Such an event gives you a perspective on life that you simply can’t imagine before. There is not a word in English that describes the epochal don’t-give-a-fuck we feel about almost anything from before. At the same time, there is an unspeakable calmness and purity of mind when you are trapped in a tempest beyond your reckoning or control. What we have is now. Literally nothing else matters.

Right now, I don’t know when or even if I will add to this publication again. To those of you I’ve known and interacted with, I just thought you should know.

Here is a photo of him grabbing his mother’s hand. In times like this, you’re always looking for silly things that require no real concentration, like making wallpaper, to occupy your mind.

What you can’t understand (but what I wish you could) is just how fast it goes. I know everyone says that. But it’s true. I was you, like, last week. Whatever else you get from this, please accept you don’t have nearly as long as you think. More than one person you know hasn’t made it this far. I promise your priorities will shift when the first of them dies.

What that means is that what I think is important is not the same as what you do. You have expectations about what your life would be like at 50. I remember them. But then you still believe procrastination is something you’ll grow out of tomorrow.

What I am is a direct result of the choices you made, and you’re about to make a doozy, one I’m still paying for. What it is doesn’t matter. Really. If I told you, you’d only focus on that and ignore the real problem, which is how you make decisions: out of fear.

Yes, you do. You’re afraid of failing. You’re afraid what people will think. I know exactly what you want to do and I know why you’re not doing it. You’re picking the safe path, the one where, if you show up and check all the boxes, a modest amount of money and status are virtually guaranteed. You’re hoping that might impress some girls.

It won’t. Girls aren’t impressed by box-checking, nor should they be. Fortunately for you, striving for anything makes failure unavoidable. You’re about to face-plant in a giant steaming pile of it. But that’s okay. That’s how we grow.

That seems backward to you, doesn’t it? Your whole life has been a parade of matriculation, of tests passed and standards met. Isn’t success how we grow? Failure seems like such a dirty word, perhaps the dirtiest. You’d rather someone call you a jerk or even a bigot than a failure. Those other things seem like they can be grown out of, but failure feels like a permanent stain, like being a felon.

It’s not true. In fact, anything genuinely worth pursuing won’t be easy to master, which means to get good at it you have to fail—typically a lot. We call this practice. The practice of life is experience.

You care so much about politics—way, way, way too much, by the way—because it seems to offer answers on loan, ahead of any experience. You don’t actually have to do anything to save the world. You don’t even have to leave the house! You just have to check the box on the right opinion—and get mad at those who don’t share it, I suppose.

If you really wanted to make the world a better place, there are any number of things you could do. You could find a child from a broken environment and commit the time and resources necessary to alter the trajectory of their life. Multiple organizations can connect you. The results will compound.

Or—keep making a spectacle of your opinions. See which has the bigger impact.

You are in charge of your life. Maybe that seems obvious, but a great many people don’t want to be. It’s a lot of work, and there’s no one to complain to if things don’t work out.

You’re not off to a great start. You put off walking as a toddler and you put off dating as a teen and now you lament not being active or attractive. It’s true your teen years didn’t matter, not in any real sense, but that’s why they were the perfect time to practice. You can screw up without screwing everything up. Making mistakes in adulthood has genuine consequences.

Over the coming years, the confident, well-adjusted women in your peer group—there are some—will start looking for a man who has his shit together. This will not be you.

Oh, there’s no cramming for this test. It’s already too late. You’ll try to rush it, but by the time you’re ready, they’ll all be married and you’ll serve a long ten years before and after a brief abusive marriage.

Honestly, that’s a tough break. I don’t envy what you’ll have to go through. Part of it is just bad luck. But part of it is a result of the choices you made. Like most young people, you don’t realize that the person in your life who will lie to you the most is yourself. It isn’t that you convince yourself of outright falsehoods. It’s that you rationalize away what you don’t want to do.

Meeting people is awkward. You’re right that you won’t find a girlfriend at a bar. That’s true. But you won’t find her on a dating app either. And the people you DO meet at bars, parties, and concerts are the friends of the women you will date, including—finally—your wife.

It’s quite a story, like something out of a novel. I won’t spoil the adventure by telling you.

You’ll want to know about money. You’ll want to know if we’re rich.

You don’t know it yet, but you don’t want to be rich. You think you do, but you don’t. You want bags of money to fall out of the sky. That’s not the same.

You’ll get close enough to wealth to see it’s achievable. You’ll experience a little of what comes with it and also what it requires, what you have to sacrifice in trade. You won’t be interested.

There’s a study published sometime between you and me in which a large sample of people over a century old were asked about life and regret. Exactly zero of them said “I regret not caring more about money” or “I really wish I would’ve spent more time at the office.” A few lamented missing out on an investment opportunity that could’ve altered the course of their life (cough cough Bitcoin cough), but that’s not the same. (That’s bags of money falling out of the sky.)

You have to make a living, but not at the expense of making a life. We will have high income and we will have no income, and we will be happy and we will be sad, and above a certain minimum, there doesn’t appear to be any relation.

Life is bumpy like that. It’s some kind of law. Everything in the universe oscillates, from light waves to planetary orbits. Your career, your beliefs, your hobbies and interests, your waistline, your engagement with friends and family, and yes, your fortune, will all undulate over time.

You’ll feel the blast of a terrorist’s bomb from just down the street. You’ll stand barefoot in the water atop an 800-foot waterfall. You’ll jump out of a perfectly good airplane and off a perfectly good bridge. You’ll never feel more alive. You’ll hold a human heart in your hands and spend hours in dissection. You’ll walk on five continents and swim in three oceans (so far). You’ll never ingest anything that gets you as high as your first full-sky view of the Milky Way. You’ll meet the love of your life on the far side of the world and drop everything to woo her. You’ll learn there is no fortune worth the things you now take for granted. You might want to work on that.

Also, dogs.

That’s it. Any wisdom I have doesn’t stretch much beyond these words.

Good luck.

P.S. Really, please, just stop with the politics already.

Without being aware of it, I had an implicit expectation that boyhood was more or less as I left it. But it’s not. If you know the stats—until recently, I didn’t—you know young men are in something of a free fall. I had a sense they were slipping, but I didn’t realize just how bad it really is.

To take one example, the gap between women and men earning college degrees is larger now than it was in the early 1970s when Title IX was introduced—and it’s getting worse. In other words, girls are now further ahead of boys than boys were ahead of girls. It seems like the reappearance of a gap that inspired landmark anti-discrimination legislation, regardless of which way it tilts, ought to spark a conversation given how important education is to young people’s future.

But this isn’t about boys. This is about what happens when a topic—any topic—is artificially suppressed.

There are always bad apples, but I suspect many people in media genuinely don’t understand why our trust in them is at an all-time low. In a recent public debate of that exact question, author Malcolm Gladwell and journalist Michelle Goldberg argued that their publications were more factual than any of the alternatives—and that may be true. (I’m not sure what Book of Truth they’re comparing themselves to, but just like Joseph Smith and the golden plates, you have to wonder why we can’t consult it directly.)

The criticism is not that the media is full of outright falsehoods, although I’m sure there are plenty. Rather, it’s that the media omit facts inconvenient to the narrative, whatever narrative it is, and they make mistakes, even honest mistakes, without ever correcting or even admitting them.

That kind of sideways discourse was expertly lampooned in the character Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski”. Walter makes incredibly bombastic statements ending with the question “Am I wrong?”, which he repeats over the stammering objections of his friends such that there’s no way to move the conversation forward except in answer.

In case you don’t get the trick, there’s a big difference between not being wrong and being right. I can recite the mean surface temperature of the earth for the last five years and not be wrong, but that doesn’t mean anything I might say about it is right.

After learning just how bad the situation with young men really is, my first reaction was a gradual, creeping sense that we’re being lied to in this way—deliberately. The facts alone are newsworthy regardless of the diagnosis or treatment. If the murder rate were twice what it was in 1970, you’d expect some kind of discussion even before getting into why or what to do about it. The mere fact that it’s higher doesn’t necessitate a particular stance on policing or capital punishment, but it’s for damn sure news. Why not cover it?

The second problem with suppressing a topic is that it absolutely breeds extremism. The conceit is that, if they don’t give us a space to discuss it, we simply won’t be able to—because prohibiting alcohol didn’t at all create a black market ten times worse.

As with everything, technology amplifies the effect. If, for example, you were intrigued about this issue—perhaps you think I’m exaggerating—and wanted to learn more, there’s not a lot of reputable “content” to serve in a search because no one is getting paid to write think pieces or make videos critiquing those think pieces. (There is some, but not much, especially compared to literally any other gender-related issue.)

For algorithms, however, serving nothing isn’t an option since that doesn’t keep you on-site in front of advertisers. And algorithms are dumb. Where there’s a gap, they don’t say “Sorry, there’s not a lot of good scholarship here.” They simply jump it and serve you the next best outrageous thing they can find.

I spent the last several days—including to 1 AM last night—watching the absolute worst of humanity. I don’t want to mention names or YouTube channels because I don’t want to give them any views. It isn’t even the raging misogynists or the parade of genuine man-baiting misandrists on TikTok that the misogynists carefully curate to artificially prove their point. There’s quite a bit of otherwise moderate content that innocently comments on or “reacts” to these videos, giving them a kind of credence and making it seem as if the views presented are far more common than they actually are, even as they rightly pick them apart.

There was a time in my youth, before YouTube and TikTok, when I was a nerdy, inexperienced, and extremely shy boy. Had it existed then, such a highly curated stream of videos cherry-picked to represent the very worst of womankind as if it were the secret heart of femininity would’ve absolutely CONVINCED me there was no point in risking rejection on such creatures. I mean, let’s face it, going up to a similarly immature stranger and betting all of your self-esteem on their off-the-cuff reaction is one of the hardest things for a social animal to do. I can’t speak for women, but most men would find it easier to save a drowning stranger than ask them on a date. If a woman shoots you down, especially in front of others, you’re immediately a low-value male. It’s really, really hard for an immature person to come back from that.

In the old days, I would’ve told guys they have to do it anyway in the same way that a hatchling, who’s only ever known life in the nest, has to stare down the equivalent of a skyscraper and believe that if they jump, their wings will magically work despite never having done so before. (Anyone who’s spent any time in nature knows there are those hatchlings that get it on the first go and those that take a lot of coaxing from mom and dad.)

This week, I came to realize it’s not as simple as when I was young. The vast majority of women will simply offer the same kinds of rejections they always have. But I am now aware of a small but amazingly vocal minority who will, for example, record a guy’s “harassment” in a bar or coffee shop and upload it to social media and invite the mob to shame them—or worse, if he was foolish enough to approach her at either of their places of employment.

To repeat for those who missed it: That won’t be the reaction of the vast majority of women, even young women. I think most of them get how difficult it is—although I’ve said for years that it would be extraordinarily helpful to the species if we required teenage girls to approach a boy a few times if only so they realize what a gargantuan effort it is.

We now have to add to that a very small but decidedly non-zero chance of mass humiliation, career damage, or even legal action. No, that doesn’t mean we should go back to the days of rampant sexual assault. One of my old bosses worked for KFC when he was young, and he used to tell stories of Colonel Sanders using his cane to lift women’s dresses in the elevator. That’s an awful if unfortunately mild example of the shit that used to happen regularly. Women (and men) need ways of safely reporting that behavior, which should be addressed.

Human relationships, especially romantic ones, are messy. They’re awkward. They’re complex. It’s pure fantasy to think the error rate on that reporting mechanism will approach zero. The best of intentions cannot alter the fact that, for example, the calculus of approaching a woman has shifted. I can easily see where an inexperienced man’s fumbling attempt at a pickup might go horribly awry or else be honestly misinterpreted. In a world where any miscommunication has real potential consequences, any guy is going to be all the more reluctant to do the thing he doesn’t even want to do in the first place.

But the biological imperative won’t diminish. And resentment will build. And that’s what I saw online: lots and lots of young men frustrated by forces—some noble, some malign—that they don’t have the context or experience to understand.

There is certainly a female side to this—or many of them. But what difference does it make when we’re not allowed to discuss it? How do we work through these changes and settle on a set of norms that defines exactly what words and behaviors are recourse-free and which are not?

In several of the videos I saw, young women were lamenting the loss of romance. They told stories about elder male family members who wooed and courted their eventual spouses, who had initially said no. What is the difference between a man so smitten that he “won’t take no for an answer” and harassment? How does a young man hedge against that, or against putting his foot in his mouth, or against a woman simply changing her mind?

Where those questions are actually forbidden, where there are punishments for even noting the mixed signals, the worst people will be the only ones brave enough to go there. Is it any surprise that those dark voices are the loudest when no one else even dares speak?

For all our sakes, we need to break this taboo and have honest painful discussions, without insults or use of the word “grift,” about how to reintroduce young people to each other.

After Galileo and Newton, that throb became instead the gear-ticks of a giant mechanism. Almanacs in the modern era were more like train schedules than horoscopes, indicating times to rise and rest, sow and reap. Festival days, once a glorious mess of local custom, where the same saint might be celebrated a thousand ways, were now aligned thanks to the heavenly regularity of God’s wristwatch. If yours wound down, no matter. Simply consult the almanac and reset the hands by the sunset that evening, predicted to the minute years in advance.

But then something amazing happened. We discovered some gears of the clock, when separated, will go on turning as if by magic. Some spontaneously swap places. Others work only when no one is looking.

When Roger Bacon looked at the night sky, he saw the eternal looking down. We see a flux paradox, where irreconcilable facts coexist as particle and wave and the sun rises and sets for everyone at the same time.

This is a handbook to that world, the world that ends tomorrow, when everything will be different.

When it changes, it will have always been that way. We find no difficulty in this. In any casual situation, a succession of changes would be met with increasing skepticism. If your cousin called off two earlier engagements, you would be genuinely suspicious of the wedding invitation you got in the mail.

But humans define our reality socially. That is how our brain works. It tells us it’s an independent agent, but in fact it’s networked and cannot function otherwise. Updates to our reality are passed from node to node like security patches to an operating system. Each successive change is not greeted with increasing skepticism but rather the reverse. That a collective belief changed is taken as evidence that it’s the best, latest, greatest information, surely much better than the silly thing we believed yesterday—even, or perhaps especially, if what we believe today is the literal opposite of what we believed yesterday, which we saw repeatedly during Covid.

That is, of course, if we even recall what we believed yesterday. Most of the time we don’t. Our networked brains are parsimonious and quickly let go of what they think they don’t need, which is of course self-reinforcing. Without the past, there’s nothing to impeach the present.

We say that those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. That has been the trend. At no point after losing a war they started do people say, “Well, that didn’t work out. But at least we tried!”

And yet, here we are tempting World War III.

In fact, it’s not about lessons. Not at all. It’s that we believe—quite fundamentally—that we are different than those who came before, that we are better. After all, those people hadn’t achieved what we’ve achieved. More than that, they believed a lot of rather silly things that we now know not to be true.

This is why we repeat the mistakes of the past, why the Ivy League policy hawks helming US foreign policy didn’t learn from the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan any more than the Soviets learned from the British before, despite all of them having studied history in school.

We’ve had ALL THE LESSONS for literally millennia. Throw as many as you want at us; we won’t budge. Lessons have made no difference because at each moment, those who occupy the present, as we do now, don’t believe they apply to them.

In the 20th Century, history gave us what is surely the closest we will ever get to a true, experimental test of a politico-economic system. Two countries were selected, one in the East and one in the West. These countries were contiguous with their people. They shared a common history, a common currency, a common language. These countries were split. One half was given communism and the other something else.

The lessons of North Korea and East Germany are clear. But we keep debating communism—under different names, of course—because we’re certain that what we believe now isn’t what anyone believed before. How could it be? We have the latest, greatest thinking. None of the old lessons could possibly apply.

Lists are the outsourcing of memory and the means by which is it emptied. To be in control of lists, then, is to be in control of memory.

Governments of the modern era were famous for making lists because a fixed, mechanical world cannot be changed; it can only be forgotten. It was necessary, then, to deplete memory to maintain control.

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?”

—George Orwell, 1984

The “vast Russian conspiracy” to “interfere in our election” was “bigger than Watergate.”

—Hillary Clinton, 2017

But we no longer inhabit a fixed world. Ours is increasingly digital, and in a digital world, reality itself can be altered. Not a virtual reality but the common living reality shared by any group of networked brains.

This is the origin of narrative warfare, which is a war for control of the social metaspace, where “misinformation”—which is to say, a fact or point of view from another metaverse—must be forcibly excluded for the dominant reality to cohere.

By itself, this is not new. Religions in particular have been practicing this kind of alternate-reality-exclusion for centuries. What’s different is that traditional religions and their adherents were aware of the program. Indeed, the absolute necessity of stamping out the devil meant that the faithful had to know their role. Hence the rituals around persecuting heretics—drowning a witch to save her soul and the like.

We are again labeling and persecuting heretics, but in the contemporary case, those in the mob are not aware that’s what they are doing or that the orthodoxy they’re defending even exists. On the contrary, most think of themselves as outsiders, even as they gather online to celebrate the punitive actions of universities, corporations, government, and state security services. (Actual outsiders would be at odds with such institutions, which speaks to the depth of the self-deception.)

But there are different classes of heretic. It is one thing, however dangerous, to espouse that which must not be true (regardless of whether it is). It is another thing entirely to expose the fourth wall, for on that every truth depends.

Special terrors are reserved for them.

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1970)

The digital world likes lists. A record is simply a list of data, which makes a database nothing but a giant list of lists. Our inclusion on the list of lists is binary, like computer code. No human is wholly bad—or wholly good, for that matter—but if you are on the No Fly list, or the Sex Offender list, you don’t get a temporary pass for carpooling or helping your neighbor clean his flooded basement.

There are those who feel safer with walls and those who feel safer with lists, but most people prefer both while pretending to prefer neither. Add hypocrisy to the list that includes death and taxes.

Here is a list of clandestine US government lists:

• Project MINARET, along with its sister, Project SHAMROCK

• Operation CHAOS

• COINTELPRO

• Rex 84

• ECHELON

• PRISM

• Hemisphere Project

• #TwitterFiles

"I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China and Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshiped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me. Siva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris. I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud."

—Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

We are a species of large ape. We are not like a species of large ape. We are a large ape. We differ from other apes only in the depth and sophistication with which we purue our animal lusts, and if we fall, it will not be because of the wrong-thinkers in some other tribe or those in power but because each of us was too frail and punitive to hold it all together.

The world is in such a bad way now that it’s once again in fashion to look on the bright side, in much the same way that by the end of the 1960s, everyone was tired of hearing how awful everything was and just wanted to teach the world to sing—and buy them a Coke.

Every people who occupy the present believe they are special. Those who occupy the present in 200 years will look back on us in much the same way we look back on those who lived 200 years ago. Those in the future will have achieved more than us (one hopes), and much of what we believe now will likely look quaint or even silly, like drowning a witch to save her soul.

You’d think at some point we’d learn humility.

It’s not that there isn’t hope. We can and have made strides. And several of the problems we face today are entirely novel. We’ve never had so many people that we’re in danger of breaching planetary limits, which only happened because we made such strides conquering the first immediate problems of hunger and disease.

But such strides typically come only in response to great catastrophe. It took repeated deadly outbreaks for us to finally address the problem of clean water. It took the Great Depression for us to enact even modest regulation of greed. It’s likely we’ll address our current problems in much the same fashion, which is to say, only after the situation gets much worse for everyone.

That’s not a guess. That’s a lesson. If true, it’s actually a cause for optimism even as we rightly prepare ourselves and our families for unexpected calamity—which we now know should not be so unexpected. Pain is our only motivation to compromise, which is a terrible inconvenience when our belly is full.

This is why we need The Almanac—because (unfortunately) it is shaping up to be an interesting century.

According to the modern mechanistic view, the universe is reducible and understandable and we humans (as far as we know) are the most advanced thing in it. This accords well with the prior Judeo-Christian view, which spawned the current scientistic one, that said God put us in charge of everything, because we’re just that awesome.

Not so for the Romans. In some sense, they lived in a far richer world, a noumenal world chock full of magic and mysteries and spirits, large and small. There was a god for everything, including separate ones for the door frame, the lock, and the hinges.

Amid such a maelstrom, the Romans needed a way to make sense of it all, and as you might expect, augury was big. It was common for Romans of high and low class to seek a reading—animal entrails were popular, although oracles were better if you lived close enough to visit one—prior to any travel or large purchase.

Fas was the way all this fit together. It was the book the augers read. And since, in the Roman view, mankind was not the king of the mountain, the Romans did not expect that this divine puzzle would be all good, free from pain, or the best of all possible worlds. In fact, they often expected the opposite, which is why they sought augury in the first place.

Thus ne + fas is more than simply “not right.” It’s against the prescribed natural order. We might call it sin, but thanks to our Victorian forebears, that word has a strong sexual connotation, which would’ve been largely absent for the Romans, who might have graphical depictions of sex acts—fertility art—in their living rooms.

If pursued intentionally, anything nefas was an abomination, something you would expect to draw the anger of the gods. Romans would have witnessed a nefas act the same way school children might witness willful misbehavior on the playground, or the way adults witness a car wreck, with an uncanny mix of horror and fascination.

But it needn’t be intentional. Nefas could also imply a kind of breakdown or kink in the world, and this was what the consuls would check for every morning before the meeting of the senate. If the entrails were “not right,” a consul—remember, there were always two, kind of like co-presidents—could declare a Nefas Day, a bad day on which to conduct state business, and so the senate would not meet.

As you can imagine, this power was regularly abused by political factions seeking to manipulate senatorial debates, and eventually the senate had to pass legislation limiting the number of Nefas Days a consul could declare. (In other words, the senate was telling the world and all the gods in it how often they were allowed to mess with things. Such are the dreams of regulation.)

I think “Nefas Days” are a great idea—not for Congress, perhaps, but for the rest of us. We all need one from time to time. I use them to help my weight loss. For me, a Nefas Day is one on which I'm allowed to eat whatever I want, which gives me the strength to stick with calorie restriction and exercise because I know a scheduled break is always coming.

The trick, as the Romans discovered, is regulating its abuse. There always needs to be a lot more right than not-right or things fall apart. But then, that's the trick to everything.

This past year, the mix has not been in my favor. This isn’t a grievance column, so suffice it to say things of late have been more not than right, and that is why this letter is so late.

There’s another entry in the Log of Strange Concordances, where I capture those aspects of the real world that bring us closer to the world of Science Crimes Division.

… When we humans do these things, we call it lobbying. Successful agents in this sphere pair precision message writing with smart targeting strategies. Right now, the only thing stopping a ChatGPT-equipped lobbyist from executing something resembling a rhetorical drone warfare campaign is a lack of precision targeting. AI could provide techniques for that as well.

A system that can understand political networks, if paired with the textual-generation capabilities of ChatGPT, could identify the member of Congress with the most leverage over a particular policy area—say, corporate taxation or military spending. Like human lobbyists, such a system could target undecided representatives sitting on committees controlling the policy of interest and then focus resources on members of the majority party when a bill moves toward a floor vote.

Once individuals and strategies are identified, an AI chatbot like ChatGPT could craft written messages to be used in letters, comments—anywhere text is useful. Human lobbyists could also target those individuals directly. It’s the combination that’s important: Editorial and social media comments only get you so far, and knowing which legislators to target isn’t itself enough.

This ability to understand and target actors within a network would create a tool for AI hacking, exploiting vulnerabilities in social, economic and political systems with incredible speed and scope. Legislative systems would be a particular target, because the motive for attacking policymaking systems is so strong, because the data for training such systems is so widely available and because the use of AI may be so hard to detect—particularly if it is being used strategically to guide human actors.

The data necessary to train such strategic targeting systems will only grow with time. Open societies generally make their democratic processes a matter of public record, and most legislators are eager—at least, performatively so—to accept and respond to messages that appear to be from their constituents.

Maybe an AI system could uncover which members of Congress have significant sway over leadership but still have low enough public profiles that there is only modest competition for their attention. It could then pinpoint the SuperPAC or public interest group with the greatest impact on that legislator’s public positions. Perhaps it could even calibrate the size of donation needed to influence that organization or direct targeted online advertisements carrying a strategic message to its members. For each policy end, the right audience; and for each audience, the right message at the right time.

Part of a short essay by Nathan Sanders, reproduced by Bruce Schneier on his blog, that does a good job of describing the immediate threat, which is probably why both of those guys have a much wider audience than I do.

In The Zero Signal I was looking even further. In the final chapter of the book, a genius chimpanzee described the next iteration of this mechanism, where AIs operating at the meta level search for indications of exactly the kinds of actions Nathan describes with the aim of inferring their owners' goals and strategies so that counter-strategies can be deployed by their own lower level AIs.

While that's the likely outcome, and also where democracy is headed this century, it might be a bit abstract for the casual reader. Or maybe I just don't pull it off well. Or both. You tell me.

Here is the essay:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/01/ai-and-political-lobbying.html

Here is the chapter:

The Fantastic Fiction of Rick Wayne

F O R E C A S T S

The office was lit only by a green desk lamp and by the small lights that hung over the framed portraits on the walls. Staid bureaucrats in business suits smiled serenely as if to assert there was nothing to fear in their care. Dr. Chang sat behind his heavy mahogany desk framed by the massive cabinet of legal texts that filled the back wall. Outside, t…

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5 years ago · Rick Wayne

I have not been following the news, but I have made it a point to follow the Twitter Files, if only because it is a fascinating study in information technology’s capacity for narrative warfare of the kind warned about in Science Crimes Division.

The establishment has always filled the news with propaganda. During the Vietnam War, Walter Kronkite lied to the American people every night—about the number of soldiers killed or how close the enemy was to their inevitable failure. The government has also often told us what we can or can’t see. Note they still haven’t released the Kennedy files.

But I don’t remember it ever being quite so overt and coordinated. We’ve long lamented the revolving door between defense contractors and the military, but the media and intelligence services have put the military-industrial complex to shame. I’ve never seen so many “former” spooks on TV telling me what to believe. If this many ex-KGB officers were TV analysts in Russia, we would cry havoc.

We can only assume that the mechanisms pointed at Twitter are also being pointed at Google, Facebook, YouTube, and elsewhere. There is certainly enough circumstantial and anecdotal evidence to suggest the existence of a large narrative coordination and control system. And it’s not in Russia. Or China.

I think some people shrug because they think they’re immune. But you’re not. Propaganda rarely convinces us that something we disbelieve is true. Not even you are so gullible. Rather, propaganda reinforces the prejudices and stereotypes we so desperately want—or fear—are true. The propagandist and his mark are codependents in an abusive marriage.

The otherwise good people who accept and perpetuate propaganda, like you, are not, for the most part, trying to be evil. Quite the opposite. Rather, they are in possession of a Noble Lie. That God hates gays. That MAGA is an existential threat (versus any other kind).

Truth is never so manifestly noble. Like light, it only ever comes in tiny packets like photons. We call them facts: a date, a quote, a Boolean condition. None of you would intentionally extinguish all the light in the universe, and yet, photons, like facts, are only ever experienced one at a time. None will ever outweigh the Noble Lie, and so one by one, they will all be got rid of.

All the easier when they turn dangerous. Facts, like photons, bounce about randomly in too great a number to be captured by anyone, and they often go where you don’t want or expect—and take people with them. It’s not only easier but better (the argument goes) to omit those that are potentially harmful, like the X-ray shield at the dentist, or to sprinkle a few extra on the other side of the scale, just to be sure someone doesn’t get the wrong impression.

The justification is simple enough to seem pure:
Propaganda is bad.
I am not bad.
Therefore, I am not perpetuating propaganda.

We only perceive the dangers immediately in front of us. When we throw democracy away, it will not be because we hate it but because we want to stop the other guys from having it.

Several of you checked in on me while I was AWOL. I see you and appreciate that. I had a request for old selections from social media. (Who has time for that anymore?!)

As Santa travels near the speed of light, time slows, which explains both how he is so long-lived and how his relatively small production team is able to make so many toys during the year.

But it does not explain how he is able to visit every house in one night. Bouncing a photon within and between every household in the world would still take a non-trivial amount of time. It would also be virtually impossible to remain undetected.

Rather, Santa makes only one light-speed trip on Christmas Eve, but that one trip is to every household simultaneously as a quantum superposition of all Santa-states, where he acts as a kind of carrier wave delivering presents that are already entangled with their owners—which is also how he can observe you remotely through the year.

That means every child MUST go to bed on Christmas Eve, and stay there. If Santa were ever observed, the wave function would collapse, and Christmas would be ruined for kids everywhere. You don't want that to be your fault, do you?

-me explaining to my future children why they need to go to sleep on Christmas Eve

There's a stock character in movies and television so common as to be trite: the over-sexed friend. They are typically supporting and rarely the star because their function is to serve as a warning to the main character that fucking for love is like bombing for peace. Even where this character is perpetually in a relationship, they are forever alone.

The earliest example I can recall off the top of my head is the character Violet from “It's a Wonderful Life.” Violet offers herself to George, but only superficially. As soon as he shares his hopes and dreams—anything other than his attention—she rejects him.

The over-sexed friend is often female, with Kim Cattrall's role in “Sex and the City” probably being the archetypal portrayal, but there are many male examples as well, such as Joey from “Friends” or Stiffler from the “American Pie” series (as well as all the knockoff roles that actor has played). Neil Patrick Harris has played a gay version a couple times.

I only mention it because I happened to catch part of a show my family was watching recently where the oversexed friend was yet another high school girl, and it occurs to me that despite a century or more of examples, we never get the lesson.

There is no greater sin than to break ranks in a time of peril. No transgression will get you excommunicated faster.

This is a real dilemma for soldiers who question orders or spies who reveal official secrets. (Would that they never needed to.) But there is no point—in a democracy, at least—where it should be bad form to question an orthodoxy.

But it is. And you all are the ones that enforce it.

It was impossible to question the existence of WMD in Iraq and still be called conservative. Your stance on issues that affected real people, from education to healthcare, didn't matter. If you didn't stand with the crowd and wave the yellow ribbon, you were a faggot commie liberal, and that's all there was to it.

A couple of years ago, if you questioned the Steele dossier or any of the absolute rubbish it created, you were a fascist. People called you that—and meant it.

It’s not the government doing this, or a bot farm in some foreign country. They may invent or amplify the threat. (Wartime powers dictate we must never feel safe.) But it’s always people like you that enforce the orthodoxy.

Common sense would dictate caution before excommunications and stonings. In the complexity of human relations, some slights are imagined.

But there is nothing common about sense. You are a large hairless ape, and you hoot with the best of them.

There are those authors, particularly in the indie space, who write thinly veiled political fables disguised as SFF or action/adventure novels. Besides that these tend to make very bad stories, they never work in their aim, which is to validate some world view.

The reason they don’t work is because, cognitively, human beings don’t relate to fiction as reality. They relate to it as if it were real, and in fact the very best books do exactly that: create worlds. But those worlds are distant. Human brains don’t perceive a relation between the seemingly real world of the book and the seemingly real world outside their window.

For one, fiction has a certain form, which we call genre, whereas life has no genre. This is why we say “truth is stranger than fiction” and are deeply dissatisfied by stories that rely on the kinds of unlikely coincidences that make up most of daily life.

Human beings can grow up on a steady diet of cyberpunk and still be shocked and angry when literally any of its horrors come true because the stories they read as adolescents don’t occupy the vulgar space of force and atoms. They occupy mythical space, transcendent space, and in fact, people often read specifically to escape vulgar space, which shows just how much they are not the same.

It’s not that we can't return from mythic space with applicable lessons. It’s that they’re always necessarily abstract. You can finish a work of literature convinced of the commonness of humanity, and five minutes later, complain about how some awful group of people on the news need to die. (If this were not so, humanity would’ve learned all the lessons it needed to centuries ago.)

The reason veiled political fables make for bad stories is much simpler. In a good story, all the choices the author makes serve it, which is why I am so adamantly opposed to “rules of writing” like “don't use passive voice” or “use adverbs sparingly.” It’s not that such things are wrong—although some are—as much as incidental or incomplete.

In art, there are no rules. But to the degree you are trying to write good fiction (and there are many, many kinds of writing besides fiction), then every choice you make—to use the passive voice or not, to open with the weather—should serve the story.

Spring writers, who are high on cleverness but low on experience, often try to break the rules seemingly for no other reason than to prove they can. Like a young adult discovering alcohol, there's an orgy of indulgence that usually results in regret.

The truth is, they reject “the rules” because they don't know how to follow them, which is to say they haven’t yet learned there are no rules but there are better and worse ways to tell a story. One of them is to make sure all your political devices serve it rather than the reverse. For one always suffers.

If you want to write a good political fable, then write a good political fable. Orwell did it with Animal Farm, which is not pretending to be science fiction. If you want people to pay you for your politics, be a journalist.

The world historian William McNeill argued that Homo sapiens had evolved specifically for synchronous ritual: dancing, chanting, marching in time. The anthropological data seem to support this. Researchers recently found that Sufis engaged in the dhikr, referred to as “the way of the heart,” will synchronize their heartbeats over hours of ritual. [1]

While this effect certainly relies on some real physical process like oscillator coupling, it doesn’t have a simple mechanical explanation. When sitting silently together mimicking each other’s behavior, lovers will also synchronize, where non-pair-bonded strangers will not.

(Interestingly, women’s heartbeats tend to attenuate more. In other words, in one experiment at least, women’s bodies settled closer to where their partners started and at a statistically significant rate. [2])

Scientists also observed this effect at a fire-walking ritual in Spain. Not only did participants’ and spectators’ heart rates approach synchrony, but "the degree of synchronicity was directly related to the level of social-emotional proximity. A fire-walker’s heart-rate patterns resembled those of his wife more than those of his friend, and those of his friend more than those of a stranger. In other words, the closer the social ties between two people, the more their heart rhythms were synchronised. This relation was so strong that we were able to predict people’s social distance simply by looking at the similarities between their heart-rate." [3]

There really is something deeply profound and necessary to belonging. It’s not a religious myth or political fabrication. Most people in post-industrial societies are missing it, and it’s leading us to ever-greater extremes of thought and behavior. To us, other people are at best inconveniences, at worst threats. We get on social media to post memes that admit as much. Like the toddler that wants you to hold her hand but also wants to walk down the stairs herself, we advertise our loneliness but never want to pay the price to cure it.

Of course, I'm hardly the first to make that observation, or this one: It’s not at all clear what we can do about it. We can’t blow up technology any more than I can pretend to believe in God. If I don’t actually love my wife, then I won’t experience the synchrony and all the attendant spiritual and physiological benefits.

I suspect this will be the major challenge for our species over the first half of the millennium: to replace what we lost without losing what we gained.

Immediately, of course, we need an exit from Perpetual War. Over the course of the century, we need an exit from fossil fuels and an antidote to narrative warfare. But all of that will be harder while we remain disconnected and suspicious of each other. Given that the only real threat to our continued existence is us, whether we survive will largely depend on whether and how we fill this gap.

[1] sapiens.org/biology/sufi-ritual-istanbul/

[2] sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130213093220.htm

[3] aeon.co/essays/how-extreme-rituals-forge-intense-social-bonds

Here are some doors we encountered on our COVID-belated honeymoon last month.

Unlike the doors I used to share back in the day, these I actually captured myself. (What can I say? I’m a better poetaster than photographist.)

And here is this month’s picture of Henry. “What about me?”

That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.

For three of those days, I couldn’t sleep, and I caught up on every movie I missed in the last five years. (I can’t recommend any.)

I am not a negative person by nature, but like a lot of middle children, I am an accomplished cynic. Some of the following are 3 a.m. thoughts from my exile. Others I’m revisiting. Don’t read if you’re in a good mood.

Extroverts are like prions, the invasive protein particles that cause degenerative mental disorders. Prions go around trying to turn everything into copies of themselves, slowly driving their hosts mad, in much the same way that extroverts do.

God loves the country with the bigger army more.

Going by the record, technologies vacillate between periods of explosion and control. In the early days of the internet, for example, there was little to no control. There was no content moderation; you could say or post anything. Government presence was limited to placards and announcements, and law enforcement had trouble connecting online actors with real persons. There was a hope, such as during the "Arab spring," that the internet would become a moderating and democratizing force.

Of course, with such little control, that meant terrorists could post beheading videos, and racial trolling and sexual harassment were a genuine problem, not to mention the predation of children, as popularized by the TV show Dateline.

With those twin excuses—terrorists and pedophiles—governments and their corporate agents spent the next 15 years extending their control over most of the online world such that today, everything the average person says or does online is now recorded and used against them. The largest country on the planet has instituted a “social credit” scoring system. Harassment by individuals has diminished, but mass harassment, organized and directed by political interests who raise mobs online, regularly deprives people of dignity or income without due process or recourse, and institutions like universities and three-letter agencies spread disinformation and suppress dissent on an industrial scale.

(Whether a person prefers the new hazards to the old tracks well with their authoritarian tendencies.)

I’ve said before that Orwell was practically an optimist. He assumed governments would force people to install listening devices in their homes, where in fact, people will not only pay for and install them themselves for the sake of a few conveniences, they will carry them everywhere, even sleep with them.

Similarly, the cyberpunk writers of the 1970s and ’80s assumed giant corporations, such as the ones that emerged from Silicon Valley over the last generation, would buy out democracy. That was the premise of countless novels, movies, and TV shows, from Neuromancer to RoboCop to Max Headroom. But in fact, it is regular people who are demanding corporations enforce an extra-legal orthodoxy.

Whether you agree with that orthodoxy (in its curent guise) is irrelevant. What’s interesting, what matters, is where those actions originate, which is not the boardroom. If we live in a dystopia, it is not a cyberpunk one. Very little of what was imagined by that movement has come to pass. But we like to think it has, we like the myth because it provides cover for our baser instincts. It means the villain of the story is not us, and we can continue paving the road ahead with our very best intentions.

The question, as always, is not whether people should be punished for saying terrible things. Of course they should. Rather, it’s who gets to decide. In the 20th century, there was a concerted push to award that power to juries, under rule of law, because prior experience taught us to fear the alternative, a warning echoed through two centuries of literature, from The Scarlet Letter to The Crucible, and repeated by Holocaust survivors and exiles from the Gulag.

“The mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.” —Victor Frankl

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We all like to think that if we were alive in, say, the Napoleonic era that we would be apalled by slavery or the serf system and work to destroy them. Biology and history suggest otherwise. There is very little that separates us from humans who lived a mere three lifetimes ago.

If the trend of technology persists, our current period of control will be followed by one of innovation, where clever humans will find a way to slip the noose woven by their comrades. If so, one wonders how the real villains of the 21st century will respond.

Despite their apparent differences, social justice activists and grumpy old men share one very important trait: nostalgia. It’s impossible to believe certain narratives without first forgetting that robber barons, yellow journalism, slavery, child labor, and actual fascism were ever a thing.

Here’s today’s Russell conjugation:

If it supports my ideology, it’s a bold statement by a fearless speaker of truth.
If it opposes my ideology, it’s deliberately inflammatory and in poor taste at this sensitive time.

“Just be yourself” has got to be the most consistently touted bad advice in the world. Subjecting a near-stranger to the unfettered you is like throwing a six-year-old into the deep end and shouting “Good luck!”

It isn’t that you’re anything to be ashamed of. And hopefully you each will find someone who shares your kind of weird. It’s always better to be authentic in your close relationships.

But not everyone is going to be that person, and there is a point where “keeping it real” is just an excuse for shifting the burden of social interaction—because there is a burden—onto everyone else.

We shouldn’t say absolutely everything that comes into our heads. I don’t need to know that you think bald men are gross, or that you like to watch. Tact is the grease of fellowship.

Popular people have problems grasping why the rest of us might not want to “be ourselves” because, by luck or practice (more likely the latter), their views and behaviors extend cultural norms. That’s the very reason they’re popular: They epitomize the social construct.

Just at random, most people are not going to. We're not going to be complete heretics either. Most of us are a mix, with the latter best saved for appropriate company.

Teenagers intuitively get this. They spend all day being told to act differently: sit still, pay attention, act your age. But the moment they express any anxiety about how to behave around others, they’re told to “Just be yourself.”

You literally spent all day telling me not to!

There is no teetotaler like the former drinker, no anti-smoker like the ex-smoker. No one is more devout than the convert, no one more bigoted than the man secretly gay. There is hidden hypocrisy behind every passionate cause.

When you’re exposed to something long enough, you begin to see its patterns. I have no special insight into strangers, but there are some kinds of people I know from experience are very unlikely to enjoy my books, and I’m always at a loss when one of them declares their interest.

All other things equal, I would spare them, but if I say that, the natural response will be to ask why, and I don’t know why. I only know that folks like them tend not to enjoy my work, and I would be very surprised if they did. Nothing further is implied, although they might reasonably think so.

AI is like that. It has absolutely no insight. It can only quantify relationships. Like a psychopath, it is completely blind to the nature of those relationships and their meaning, which is why, after seeing you bought a casket, it pesters you for weeks to buy another.

I'm not sure the average person is aware of just how many highly paid, ostensibly intelligent people are presently preparing armies of these machines to do more and more of our thinking for us, from logistics to customer service to education to health care, nor how that will impact the long-term prospects for human happiness.

I keep hearing some version of the idea that clever people can say things in such a way as to maintain plausible deniability.

I doubt it. Your average befuddled politician or milquetoast HR mouthpiece is not particularly clever. They're simply dishonest and practiced at their dishonesty.

Ambiguity is easy. Clarity is hard.

Human wetware automatically updates with the latest shared delusion. If you don’t like this reality, don’t worry. When it changes tomorrow, it will have always been that way.

The news cycle is deliberately amnesiac. It’s designed to pump you so full of the latest breaking news that you’ll feel good about yourself for being so well-informed, especially versus all those dullards out there. I mean, how could you not be better when you always have the latest, greatest facts?

It doesn’t matter what news you’re getting. The people claiming election fraud now want you to forget that they brushed aside those very same concerns in 2016, and the people in charge now want you to forget they seriously and repeatedly raised the issue before.

Facts seem intrinsically valuable. After all, they're facts! But absent context, facts are at best trivia, at worst misleading, a point famously satirized by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when it was revealed the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. As facts go, none could be more important. And yet, by itself, 42 is not just meaningless, it’s absurd.

This is why life in the 21st century also feels absurd, despite that we generate more facts, more data, more information in an hour than could be collected across the whole of the 19th century—all of it immediately available to us.

So with the news, which simply repeats the number 42, a nominally important but context-less fact, over and over and over in various guises.

And so, too, with the FBI, who, in a sick pantomime of a 1950s police drama (“Just the facts, ma’am”), seriously believed after 9/11 that the problem was an absence of intelligence, when in fact it already possessed all the facts it needed. What it lacked was accountability.

The people complaining about the FBI now want you to forget that they were the ones who skirted that accountability, instead tacking off the shackles, and the people in charge of the FBI now want you to forget that it ever had shackles or why.

The people complaining about the FBI now want you to forget that they were fine when the targets of its illegal tactics were “communists” and civil rights activists, and the people in charge of the FBI now want you to forget the Church Commission was ever a thing. (Indeed, it's hard to imagine a world where Congressional committees challenge the three-letter agencies instead of egging them on.)

There will always exist people willing to pay for certain news not to be delivered. If you aren’t paying for the news you consume, you will always be outbid.

We've turned the world into a sitcom. Every crisis breeds a moral that we forget before the start of the next episode, when everything is exactly as it was before, which is why, despite all the crises of the last 15 years, nothing seems to change.

A lot of people I consider very intelligent seem to have an almost messianic faith in crypto, even as we watch it get capitalized in real time. This seems to me like a bad rerun of the ’90s, when against the warnings of people like me, there was widespread belief that information technology was going to be a kind of amulet that enlightened and liberated mankind just for the wearing of it.

If it seems odd to you that all these NFTs are suddenly selling for millions of dollars, you don’t know much about money laundering or tax evasion.

On and off, I’ve spent a good chunk of the last year researching the newsletters on Substack, trying to get a sense of what takes off and what doesn’t and why. The first and foremost cause, as always, seems to be chance. Not much to do there. But below that, a clear theme emerged.

To understand it, you first have to accept that something takes off because it’s shared, not because it’s liked. There may be a correlation between liking something and sharing it, but if so, I expect it’s weak. It may even be negative in that what people love most is to hate on things.

Liking is private. It’s the secret in your heart. Sharing is a public statement of identity, even where that statement is something simple like “I think this is funny.” It makes the conversation about the sharer. When others feel the same, identity is validated and in-group bonds are reinforced, which feels good. Thus, the most explosive and widely shared newsletters don’t simply cover a topic. They cover it sympathetically (or critically) as an expression of a specific but often not stated group identity.

For example, one rapidly growing newsletter about the difficulties of dealing with mental illness had the clear subtext that other people—the out-group, presumably those without mental illness—make it especially hard. In other words, it’s everyone else’s fault. Another newsletter about the challenges of making it as writer had the subtext that no creative endeavor is as difficult, but fear not: the author was going to figure it out, thereby hinting at a secret sauce.

One political analysis newsletter that exploded in just weeks was an occult out-group attack. While it appeared to wrestle with the complexity of things, it was never to an indeterminate conclusion, which you would expect if the world were actually complex. Rather, it always seemed to find fault with the bad people—in one case at least, even where they weren't directly involved!

Importantly, all of these outlets were very well written and expertly researched. I’m not suggesting they lack quality, or that some measure of skill isn’t also a reason for their success. You do have to know your stuff and be able to explain it clearly.

But it’s precisely that professionalism, and the corresponding appearance of impartiality, that underwrites the identitarian validation. Like the fourth wall in fiction, it maintains the illusion that what’s on offer is anything but mental masturbation.

So, if you want to have a successful publication, you have to be shared, and if you want to be shared, don’t write anything that challenges your audience. Instead, consistently challenge their opponents while maintianing the fourth wall. If you can do that, you’ll most likely have a winner.

It’s only been seven years, but I’m beginning to suspect that fortune cookie was a lie.

Finally, here is this month’s picture of Henry and Sadie, replicating how I felt on the couch.

More chapters of ANACHRON are coming.

That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.

Not all the time, of course. But occasionally, I had thoughts that were provocative more than baiting, thoughtful more than ponderous.

A big part of the problem is that I have no background in my current occupation, so there’s a great deal of OJT, on top of which I still have to be productive enough to earn a living.

That seems to be getting better. September really kicked my butt—I worked every weekend and well after dinner most weekdays—but as a result, I’ve made enough to give Orine a much-belated honeymoon in January. (The strong dollar really helps.)

The rest is psychological. It’s as if a loved one died, and having closed the door to their room, I left it untouched as a shrine to loss. It’s simply too painful to open a writing project. The wound has yet to scar.

If anyone had any doubts as to whether I intend to keep writing, I’ll offer that wonderful line from the Marvel show WandaVision: “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

Of course I do. As if I could be anything other than what I am.

I can write this because I was never really a blogger. It was always a chore more than anything. But cracking open a novel—the feel of it, the cadence—is the happy melody of a lost lover’s favorite song. I’ve tried. I just can’t bear it.

So I apologize to all of you who’ve been so supportive over the years. It feels a bit stale to say it now, but I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I haven’t rewarded that support.

I’m sorry things haven’t turned out like we’d hoped.

I’m sorry for my weakness.

It’s not enough, but I’ll offer my hand at least so you know that I mean it.

Both in his essays and his fictions, C.S. Lewis repeatedly noted there is an undulation to life:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.

—The Screwtape Letters

What has withered will, with water and sunlight and the simple passing of time, return anew.

(This, of course, is where it gets worse.)

Although I have new chapter of ANACHRON to share, and several more besides, I have not written anything substantial in months. That is the truth of it. I’ve shared little to nothing on social media, where I am all but a ghost, and I don’t follow the news. Of whatever impending catastrophes preoccupy the collective mind—they never cease—I remain blissfully unaware.

Should one of them buck the trend, I can do little about it anyway.

In that way, I will be villain to many. The only thing the anxious hate worse than wrong opinions are no opinions at all. One must pick a side, where that is not the side of one’s family, community, or personal life because such things bear no relation to the busybody, and everything must in some way be about them and their struggles.

I have my own. I’ll let the rest of you be heroes.

Thanks to Glenn for making my month with the following, and to John Ward for bringing it to my attention. (As mentioned, I’m not much on social media anymore.)

If you haven’t already, you really should subscribe to John’s Substack, which has the most apropos title I’ve yet seen:

(I’ll have more recs in future posts. Just because I’ve been a bum lately doesn’t mean others have.)

There is, unfortunately, another entry in The Log of Strange Concordances, wherein I track those bits in THE ZERO SIGNAL that seem to be coming true.

Here is the entry:

The book supposes the existence of an automated data market where algorithms buy and sell enormous volumes of data, any bits of which are relatively harmless (and near-worthless) but which collectively determine much of what we can and can’t do in daily life, despite being largely opaque to us, to lawmakers, and even to the owners of such systems.

Specifically, the villain of the book brags that he made a name for himself as a young man by deanonymizing cell location data in exactly the manner described in this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Inside Fog Data Science, the Secretive Company Selling Mass Surveillance to Local Police

Fog states that it does not collect personally identifying information (for example, names or email addresses). But Fog allows police to track the location of a device over long stretches of time — several months with a single query — and Fog touts the use of its service for “pattern of life” analyses that reveal where the device owner sleeps, works, studies, worships, and associates. This can tie an “anonymous” device to a specific, named individual.

Together, the “area search” and the “device search” functions allow surveillance that is both broad and specific. An area search can be used to gather device IDs for everyone in an area, and device searches can be used to learn where those people live and work. As a result, using Fog Reveal, police can execute searches that are functionally equivalent to the geofence warrants that are commonly served to Google. 

This service could be used to determine who was near the scene of a violent crime around the time it was committed. It also could be used to search for visitors to a Planned Parenthood or an immigration law office on a specific day or everyone who attended a protest against police violence.

In fact, according to the EFF, the LAPD has already done that, and without having to worry about those pesky warrants.

More than one reader of THE ZERO SIGNAL has suggested to me that I overplayed the Big Data card in the book, that Big Data has nowhere near delivered on the promises of its proponents—or the fears of its detractors—to which my response has always been “That’s true. It hasn’t—yet.”

It seems to me the pace of data collection will not slow. It will continue accelerating, if only because the cost of collecting and storing that data will continue to drop. More and more devices will collect more and more data points because there will never be an incentive not to. The data could be useful to the collector, and since you can’t go back and get it later, and since it costs next to nothing to store, it will always seem better to grab it, or at least to grab a little more than last time, and so on.

Having grabbed all that data, now mostly sitting useless, its owners will eventually seek to monetize it, if only to make a few extra bucks and defray the cost of collection. In that way, data collection becomes a feed-forward mechanism that exists largely to sustain itself.

If true, then where we are today is nowhere near where we will be in 30 or 60 years. The argument is not that all that data will be collectively predictive, Hari Seldon-style. Most of it won’t be. That seems to be a law of information-dense systems. Most DNA, for example, is “junk.”

It’s not a question of volume. Excellence in complex systems is rare and tends to appear through stochastic interactions at the margins, the same way life appeared in tide pools or at the edge of thermal vents. It takes volume to get there.

When we do, I suspect we’ll eventually uncover some remarkable connections that will allow for hitherto unimaginable social interventions at scale, almost entirely in secret because those connections will not be visible or accessible to the democratic polis—at least not without major shifts in law, policy, oversight, and enforcement, and ordinary people don’t seem to have a stomach for any of the above, at least not at the expense of even the smallest of conveniences.

There are simple ways to start. Revive an interest in anti-trust. Split Google search from the rest of the increasingly dystopian Alphabet corporation. Give digital tenants on Amazon or YouTube the same rights as their physical counterparts. Pass a digital bill of rights, several versions of which have already been drafted. And so on.

As long as it remains more popular to use those platforms as levers to persecute political threats, none of that will happen. Humans—even the ones who claim to know better—are very bad at sacrificing today to save a hundred tomorrows. We live under the tyranny of the present, where nothing is ever as scary as what’s scary right now, and so every crisis that can be eventually will.

If you have any room left for kind thoughts, save a few for my wife, who was turned down for several jobs recently and who is feeling puny and unwanted in America as a result. Given I can theoretically do my job from anywhere, we may move back to Japan at some point. We’ll see.

Here’s this month’s picture of Henry, along with the newest addition to the family, my mother’s puppy Sadie, who I call Marshmallow because that’s what she looked like when we got her.

And here is our family Christmas photo, to be sent to all the relatives. We know what everyone thinks of Kansas.

That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.

Catching up after a gap always gives a unique glimpse into life. There's a sudden tearing away of the Band-aid. You get two data points: where they were headed when last you knew them and where they are now. Sometimes the difference is dramatic.

In Beth's case, she was on her way to becoming CEO, and she ended up dead.

Seeing so many sudden spirals—up, down, to the side—where almost no one lands where you expect (myself included), you realize how even the best-laid plans are sandcastles at low tide. Whatever it is we expect from our lives will in large measure fall apart, leaving only clumps and a few random spires.

The reason we’re never surprised, the reason our castles always seem intact, is that we constantly editing them. We change our expectation with every wave, expanding and moving our sandcastle such that it persists from moment to moment, even as it’s constantly disintegrating.

This isn't an argument against plans. Everything we do accomplish in life we accomplish on our way to a destination we never reach, but without any destination, we never arrive anywhere.

I suppose in some way it's an argument for stopping to smell the roses. Certainly, we can linger too long there, and we all know people who have. (Me, for example, these past few years.) But what a tragedy to never stop at all—or to fall off the cliff in your haste.

Catching up after a gap also gives you an uncommon perspective on your own life. Having explained it to so many people, I realized I am quite lucky. There was tragedy, to be sure. My abusive first marriage, for example. But also many tiny triumphs.

I'm often heard to say: if you don't celebrate the small things, you don't end up celebrating anything. I've had numerous experiences that I wouldn't trade for anything. I cut a human heart out of its chest and sat for hours with it in my hand, meticulously cleaning every artery and vein. I stood less than a block away from terrorist's bomb as it exploded. I stood with my soles in the water at the top of a hundred-foot waterfall in the Amazon. I braided jasmine flowers into garlands in a tiny apartment in Bangalore. I gambled in Macau, swam naked in the Mediterranean, fell in love in Tokyo. I’ve been married, divorced, and married again. I've been rich. I am poor. But I am very, very wealthy.

Educated people are much better at reasoning badly, probably because they’ve had more practice.

I had an idea a while back for a story, tentatively called Glitch Circus, about a post-human future, where tribal robots live among our urban remains, which are slowly being reclaimed by nature.

To prevent them from uprising, we hard-coded an inability to repair themselves (among other things). Their own bodies are as confusing to them as ours are to us, and they routinely employ quack medicine and sympathetic magic in their attempts to fix bugs and breakdowns.

The most they can do is make a peg leg, for example, although they can and do adorn themselves, such as with pigments or feathers, and there are precise rules, akin to symbolic logic, that define who can use these adornments and how.

Since robots with fewer defects are more able, they rise to the top of a fiercely hierarchical machine network governed by an ornately-decorated priestly class who have been ritually disabled (to symbolize their power is non-physical) and who are carried around in divans.

The head of the church is the Supreme Server, who only ever appears at the top of the old building that serves as the church's headquarters and who speaks of being a servant to his people, even as his enormous, ENIAC-like girth is carried around by slaves.

Ordinary people are part of the Cache. The most broken robots are relegated to an untouchable-like caste, who survive on the dangerous work of bringing materials in and waste out of the firewall, and who augment their disabilities in odd and heretical ways.

One of these outcasts has contracted a virus which is making it behave oddly. By rule, it should be terminated. Instead, its uncanny and intrepid friends have hidden it, although its partner is too afraid of the virus to interface.

After one of them hears a rumor from a traveler that a group of humans was encountered soe distance away. Most don’t believe the tale since the teller is also a braggart. Out of desperation to save their friend, who is now glitching wuite badly, the outcasts set off into the wilds to find the humans, who will be able to repair her.

(They even bring her old, broken body parts in the hopes of being remade exactly as she was.)

Along the way, the group encounters new animals, natural disasters, hostile tribes with strange and dangerous rituals, and of course the detritus of human civilization, which they often describe humorously incorrectly.

At some point, one of the outcasts accidentally catches another eating, and it is revealed she is not a robot but a human child, one of the last, who has been hiding among them, scavenging the wastes of the city with the others. She hides her identity under a suit of scrap, which the robot finds horrific, like we would if we found a robot wearing the skin of a corpse.

The discovery is not just disheartening but also leads to a crisis of faith, since it's also revealed the young human has no idea how to repair robots. For that reason, the two decide to keep the secret for a time, at least until they can figure out what to do.

At the end of their adventure, the group reaches their destination and finds evidence of recent human habitation, but everything has been destroyed. This is in fact the home of the human girl, who fled when her family was attacked by robot soldiers under orders of the Supreme Server.

With their quest in doubt, the group begins to splinter, and the human reveals herself in an attempt to keep them together. Facing the truth, the robots are alternately dejected and angry. One of them attacks her, claiming it’s all lies. Others rush to stop another from jumping off a cliff.

The human says she was present on the robots’ last annual holiday, when the holy book none of them are allowed to see is held aloft. She tells them it is a robotics textbook, and that theoretically, if she could study it, she might be able to repair them.

The last of the remaining true friends head back, some small hope renewed, and that is where the book ends.

I'm sure some people do get an endorphin rush from exercise, and those are the people who disproportionately volunteer for exercise studies that demonstrate an endorphin rush from exercise.

Not even the wise Greeks could devise a more tedious, existential torture than to roll a heavy weight up an endless hill.

The economics of the medium, especially back in the day, meant that TV shows were made to be disposable: to be watched once and never again. Hence, it was a rare show that ever seemed worth the time.

A few very popular shows were syndicated, but producers couldn't know in advance that "Gilligan's Island" would be wildly more popular than "Dobie Gillis", which meant at the point of production, it was typical to budget each episode for one-time, disposable viewing, which gave TV that canned aura. (Economically, TV shows and TV dinners had a lot in common.)

The economics of television also created a common market, where we all tended to watch the same things. Any broadcast medium like radio or TV has a more or less fixed inventory. There are only so many bankable viewing hours in a day. Once those are gone, there's nothing left to sell, so back in the day, broadcasters tried to maximize revenue by filling a fixed number of slots with content that would appeal to as many people as possible rather than to this or that narrow segment, as today.

Given the audience for reruns was lower, so was the ad revenue they generated, which meant they often ran in summer, when viewership was lower anyway. Networks didn't broadcast an expensive-to-produce first-run show when large chunks of their audience was on vacation or otherwise out enjoying the nice weather.

Of course, the nature of TV also meant that if viewers missed a show, there wasn't a convenient option for catching it, so if they wanted to see it, they had to be sure to tune in at the appropriate first-run time, which is why it was common for people to say "I have to hurry or I'm going to miss my show."

Like syndication, the home video market allowed producers to make a little extra money on a series that turned out to be popular after the fact, but in the brief era of the video store, the majority of its shelves were filled with movies, not TV shows, and for one simple reason.

Unlike television, which was piped directly to your house, you had to get in the car to go to a movie. It was an outing. (Remember, the first movie theaters were single-screen palaces.) That meant the production value had to warrant the outing—not to mention the distribution costs of shipping all that film—such that many major-release movies were good enough to watch a second or third time.

In other words: whereas television was generally made to be cheap and disposable, movies were generally not.

Streaming changed all that. Over the last 20 years, the economics of production have shifted dramatically and movies and TV have crept ever closer to each other.

Where before, only television was piped into our homes, now movies are, too. But unlike broadcast television, streaming allows us to watch any show at any time. Producers no longer have to worry about anyone missing anything.

Nor are studios limited to the number of broadcast hours in a day. They can make more stuff than anyone can watch, as long as there's money in it.

As a result, average movie quality has slipped, while quality of TV has increased dramatically such that the very best TV shows—something like Game of Thrones—can outperform large chunks of the movie market, which was never the case before.

"Made-for-TV movie" used to be synonymous with middling quality, and they had their own range of stars, who were almost never big names. Now, of course, some of the most popular actors in Hollywood headline made-for-streaming films.

Nor is Hollywood the global giant it once was. Lower production costs and the internet have made it economical to produce films for local consumption in every major language, from Swedish to Telugu.

It used to be I could only see a BBC show occasionally on PBS, and I had no idea what they were watching in Germany or Japan. These days, I can watch the quirky New Zealand mystery show "The Brokenwood Mysteries" from my couch in Kansas and it doesn't suck nearly as bad as any random episode of "The A-team".

Content has also changed. Barring the odd two-part season ender, any episode of "The A-team" (or the innumerable shows like it) was wholly self-contained. Everything you needed to know was packed into the intro, and that week’s story was resolved by the top of the hour.

Once the risk of missing an episode went away, producers were not only free to link plots across episodes, they had a strong incentive to—to keep you watching. Even shows that introduce and resolve conflict in a single episode, like "The Blacklist" or "The Mandalorian", also have ongoing plots to which the resolved events are tied.

Where before, the incentive was to keep everything superficial and short, to wrap everything up in 30 minutes or an hour, now the incentive is to draw it out as long as possible. TV shows today have lots of goings-on, but resolution always stays just over the horizon. Like soap operas, plot points seemingly resolved in season two roar back to life in season five.

In other words, narrative video on any size screen is less concerned with telling a great story than it is with tricking you into watching a series of commercials, or at least not canceling next month's subscription fee.

TIL "Rub-a-dub-dub" is about three dudes going to a peepshow. Exactly what I would want to explain to a small child.

0.1mm is roughly the diameter of human hair. If you magnified a 0.1mm dot until it was the size of the observable universe, the Planck length would be roughly the size of a 0.1mm dot.

In other words, if there were a universe in the tip of your hair, the Planck length would be the width of a hair inside that universe.

I know it’s a length, but that always invoked Zeno’s paradoxes in my mind. Why couldn't it be divided?

Instead, I think of it this way. If the universe gets more probabilistic the smaller you go, then the Planck length (and Planck mass/time/energy) is the point at which the probabilities reach some extreme or undefined state. There's nothing to divide because below that point, reality itself is undefined.

People tend to think deepfakes will encourage us to believe what isn’t true. I expect it will be the exact opposite.

They will have a pernicious effect, just not a direct one. Deepfakes will make us skeptical of the world such that we will cling to our biases more.

Whether they are ever used much outside entertainment or not—I doubt it—their mere existence will make us less likely to believe what is true, especially where that truth sounds anything like something the bad people might say.

The net result is that we’ll fall further into our individual fantasy worlds. But despite the common fears of propaganda and disinformation, such worlds will not be constructed by deepfakes but by the biases we already carry with us.

In other words, it’s never technology that does us in but our innate, animal reactions to it.

Back in college, my father expressed skepticism about the work of one of my roommates, who was a biologist studying cattle egret colonies in rural Oklahoma. My father wanted to know what possible societal value that could have.

I explained to him—badly—that you could never know in advance, that nature is robust and has probably already solved most of our problems, and that if we only studied those aspects of nature that had clear first-order benefits, we would soon run out of benefits.

For example, if we ever learn how to regenerate limbs (or organs), it will probably be because we studied slugs and newts that can do it. Same for cryogenics and certain species of frog that can literally be frozen solid in winter and survive the thaw.

Someone first had to study those frogs and slugs and newts, to describe their habitat and lifecycle in detail, before anyone knew that they were doing these things.

Case in point, the dragonfly. Someone had to study the dragonfly—in other words, get paid to capture dragonflies and catalog the various species and take measurements of them and their environment—before one of them realized it was odd how an insect that spent its life around water seemed very resistant to bacterial infections on its diaphanous wings.

Turns out dragonfly wings have a specific kind of bactericidal nanotopography. That is, they kill bacteria by their surface shape, not with chemicals or excretions. If we could mimic that, we could develop surgical instruments and meat-packing surfaces that were naturally antibacterial in a way that would not contribute to drug resistance, which is a very real and lethal problem.

Budgets are a thing, of course. We can’t fund everything. Still… it’s amazing to me how, under any party, we always seem to have more money for bombs.

Bactericidal Effects of Natural Nanotopography of Dragonfly Wing on Escherichia coli
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.6b13666

Quoting a fact checker is like copying answers from whoever is most popular in class.

A famous dead guy once famously observed that man is a social animal. We all feel the need to connect, and yet we all—myself included—resist the effort required. It always seems like human connection ought to come cheaper than it does, because wow it can be frickin' expensive.

I was reminded of that recently, of the effort required, when a long-time contact parted ways. In those moments, my first reaction is to say “Fuck all of it” and storm away, but I would only be kidding myself, like those people who swear they'll never fall in love again.

I can sometimes be incisive. The thing about incisive words is that they're the same as any knife. They can be a vital, even life-saving tool when they cut the line that's drowning you. At all other times, they're a weapon.

The difference is, one generally knows when one is handling a knife, whereas incisive words feel in the mouth the same as any other kind—except, I suppose, when they've been dipped in the acid of sarcasm.

To anyone who's been cut or burned: I should be more careful. I'd like to think I will be in the future, but I'm old enough to know what an empty promise that would be.

The point at which it happens a second or third time, you could try talking to me about it. I’ve never turned anyone away. But if that's too expensive, it's probably best to take care of yourself and leave me to die miserable and alone surrounded by all my knives.

As usual, there’s a lot to read on the site. Head on over to rickwayne.substack.com for more. If you haven’t yet, you can watch the video of the tornado that passed within a mile of our house, tearing up large swathes of our little community:

The Fantastic Fiction of Rick Wayne

...and then this happened

Watch now (51 sec) | On Friday night, just before sundown, warning sirens sounded as a wall of dark clouds moved overhead. When everyone’s phones erupted simultaneously in warning, I went onto the back deck, where I could see the clouds turning. Slowly, a spindle fell. The video above was taken in the front yard and captures the tornado’s closest point to the house, barely a…

Read more

4 years ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Rick Wayne

Or, you can start the new book, which is just about done:

The Fantastic Fiction of Rick Wayne

E V I D E N C E S

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5 years ago · 2 likes · Rick Wayne

Finally, here is this month’s picture of Henry. His mom is still in Japan, but at least he has his best friend.

That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.

The video above was taken in the front yard and captures the tornado’s closest point to the house, barely a mile away at the next intersection.

The drone footage below starts at our local YMCA, where my dad has been working out since his health scare earlier this year. The tornado tossed two dozen cars into the building, which is right next to the grocery store where we all were shopping just five hours before the storm.

Car accidents, even fatal ones, happen all the time—once every fifteen minutes in the US alone. We all know that. But it doesn’t stop us from staring whenever we see that sheet on the road.

We know that people are dying of cancer right now, more than any of us could count. But it’s still a horror to witness.

We know people are robbed. We know they are murdered. These things happen. But there is a difference between them happening, even with regularity, to others and them happening even once to us.

There’s not a name for that sensation, but there ought to be.

As a writer, it feels like in moments like this I should have something pithy to say about mortality and serendipity—or even pure, dumb luck. I mean, if weather conditions had varied just a little…

But then I remembered I did have something to say. I wrote about it once, several years ago. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll share it here.

The following passage comes from Curse of the Red Dagger, the second course of Feast of Shadows, my epic urban occult mystery, in a chapter titled Never Play Cards With a Sorcerer. It’s the very end of that course, in fact, and the narrator, a young artist named Cerise Song, is reflecting on the fact that she’s about to be willingly murdered…

That’s it, I guess. They’re kinda waiting on me now. Little bit nervous. It’s so crazy not knowing what’s going to happen in, like, an hour. But then, we never really do, do we? We just think we do—until something happens to wake us from the illusion: a car crash, news of cancer, a child’s first breath. Etude says that’s where Life is lived. Not respiration and metabolism. Not work and school and laundry and groceries. Not the long sleep of existence but where it shatters. Those few brief flashes where we’re awake to our own consciousness, like a too-bright light. That’s where the angels live, and the ones he called the Others. I think that’s where he lives, too.

But not me. I can barely stand it. I feel burnt down, like my mind is on fire, like someone turned the saturation of the world to 200%. It hurts my eyes to look. Knowing these moments could be my last, I sit catatonic with wonder. The slightest breath enchants me. The patient throb of my heart. The bend of the light through the pane. The bob of a branch as a bird alights. I want to draw it all, to reflect, if only in one image, that rapture I feel, the rapture of being alive. I think that’s all art is, really.

We never really know what’s going to happen next. Even when we think we do. So I guess we’ll see.

I guess we’ll see.

Here is this month’s picture of Henry—listening to his mom talking to him through the camera from Japan.

That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.

Thank you for your letter. I don’t wish to offend, but I’ve been asked that question before, and I’ve learned something like the following is the best advice I can give. It may or may not be good advice.

No one is born knowing how to write a novel. Some spring writers succumb to the idea that if they just work hard enough—or want it bad enough—they can create something compellingly good their first time at bat. Probably not. Imagine a student-surgeon believing that. Probably we’ll need to practice, where practice doesn’t mean writing and rewriting chapters. A surgeon isn’t a surgeon because she’s good at cutting, and we’re not chapterists. We’re novelists. That means we’re probably going to have to write a few novels before we’re good enough to be paid. An author’s first novel published is rarely their first novel written. There are exceptions, but probably you’re not one. I wasn’t either.

Still, I’m glad you’re writing. I encourage everyone to write a book. I even convinced my elderly father, who blames me entirely for the cowboy trilogy he’s almost finished. I think there’s value in writing, as there is in learning a musical instrument or a foreign language, even where you don’t intend to become a musician or interpreter. But there’s a difference between learning the guitar for personal growth and playing it professionally, where you expect people to pay you for the pleasure of listening, just as there’s a difference between running a marathon for the challenge and competing to win prize money.

There’s something about writing a novel that makes people think it’s not like those other things, that it’s something they can sufficiently master the first time out, whereas you hardly hear anyone say they’re composing a symphony and hoping their first attempt will be played by the Royal Philharmonic.

I’m not surprised you are struggling. The bad news is it’s not immediately going to get easier. The good news is the struggle is where you learn.

Definitely don’t write anything you’re not excited to write. Our words are our babies. If you’re not excited about yours, no one else will be by a long shot. Readers are not forgiving. And they can smell a cheat. It’s hard enough to convince them to give you a chance. You don’t get a second. And remember, if you’re going to do it professionally, you’re not going for the sale. The few dollars you make isn’t even going to buy you a coffee. You’re going for the recommendation, and you’re not going to get it if you know or even suspect a big chunk of your book is a slog. That’s point number one.

Point number two you already mentioned: editing. There is no version of this book that won’t require major rewrites before it’s worth reading. Accept that in your bones, and accept that you can’t get to the second draft until the first is done. So, finish it. If you’ve written yourself into a corner, or into a general malaise for the story, skip to the part you are excited about. Often, the mere act of writing spurs more, but either way, finish the draft, even if you suspect there are holes. You can address whatever needs addressing in the rewrite. It’s your first time, so you may need several major rewrites, where you cut your dear to the bone, before you can’t make the story any better. We learn by doing, so regardless of the outcome, your second novel will be easier. People may even pay you for it.

Sincerely,

me

I heard from a pair of readers recently, which is a rarity for me. To the first, I sent the text above, which is a version of a response I’ve used once or twice a year for the last several years. I suspect it’s not what most folks want to hear, but it is the best thing I can tell them.

To the second, I sent a thank you for this:

I’ve said for some time that if I’d had a serious marketing budget for that series, it might’ve taken off. The problem—or at least one of them—was the format. There’s not a ready market for a series of novellas, or at least there’s not perceived to be, which is why it would’ve been pointless to query it.

These things are hard.

Last week, my life changed irrevocably, and not for the better. I’m not able to give any details because there is likely legal action pending. Suffice it to say, I was accused of something I did not do, but I was punished for it anyway, solely based on my race and gender.

That is not speculation. I was told that explicitly at the same time I was told I would not be given a chance to rebut. I was not contacted at all, in fact, until after the decision had been made. One moment, life was normal. The next, I was slandered and thrown out.

That night, lying in bed, I felt cold. My wife, crying next to me in sadness and frustration, suggested I was physically in shock. I suspect she was right.

It was her birthday.

We live in Kafkaesque times. Lots of people, convinced they are good, don’t care to consider the consequences of their actions, as if the road to hell were paved with anything else. I thought that by leaving Twitter, I would be more or less insulated from it. But there is no insulation. It is everywhere.

Writing books is hard. Marketing them is hard. Life is hard. That’s not simply an observation. It’s a mathematically provable fact.

In 2014, on a visit to Los Angeles, I got a very strange tattoo: the Second Law of Thermodynamics surrounded by the ourobouros, or snake devouring its tail. I call it a Western yin-yang, and I permanently marked it on my skin as a reminder that such things happen.

I like that the Second Law isn’t an equation. Equations simply say that two things are equal. It may be interesting to know that, but in the end, every equation is reducible, in a philosophical sense, to 1=1.

The Second Law isn’t even a proper function. It’s a boundary condition: a barrier. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the scientific expression of man's expulsion from paradise. It’s the reason you have to work because it’s the reason you have to eat, wear clothes, vacuum and dust your house, fix your car, have health insurance, and generally put effort into anything and everything, because order can never come about on its own. It always requires effort.

The Second Law is also the reason we grow old and die, and why we can't reverse time, like running back a tape, and go back to fix our mistakes. We can only go forward, bleeding chaos like a wake.

It's very Shakespearean. If Hamlet were alive, he would go about quoting the Second Law. I'm sure of it.

To be or To be

The symbol that surrounds the Second Law on my arm has many meanings, which is partly why I chose it. It's a perfect counterpoint to the precision of science. But more than that, the ourobouros defies the Second Law. If a serpent really were eating itself and then using the digested tissue to regrow what it lost, it would continually lose energy to heat, meaning it could never recover everything it ate and the "system" would wind down to death.

And yet, the serpent doesn't die. As a circle, the symbol of infinity, it goes round and round, eternally fulfilled by the mysterious source from whence all comes, including the Second Law.

So, here we have the universal opposites: infinity and the finite, fact and superstition, science and magic, terror and meaning, the end and the beginning, the barrier to paradise and the hope of its return. Between those dancing ends, the poles of possibility, lie all things. That's where I am and where you are, on the far side of the barrier struggling to do the best we can.

I don’t know what will happen next, if what stained me last week will become permanent. I also don’t know when I will be free to discuss it. I do know that I may be silent for a while. I have a lot of work to do to fight this.

But at least I have my wife, who has been wonderfully supportive (so much so that even my father commented on it). And of course this guy.

Here is this month’s picture of Henry.

That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.

Japanese TV periodically broken into prime time to flash news and images, but since little was known, there was little they could say to an audience on the other side of the world, and normal programming resumed. To this day, I've never seen footage of the people who hurled themselves in desperation from the upper floors. By the time I got stateside, they had stopped broadcasting them out of respect for the dead.

The next morning—still the evening of the 11th back home—I sat on a tatami mat soaking in shock and loss. I remember the incongruity more than anything; it was such a beautiful day. The sun was shining through the leaves of the ginkgo trees, which would soon take its color. The world was in limbo, frozen, but I was aware of everything more, as if it were all somehow more alive.

All flights to the US were grounded, and my buddy and I had a serious conversation over coffee about the very real possibility of me being stuck with him in his tiny studio apartment. He left for work, and I stared in silence at the walls of the oversized closet that was our living room, dining room, and shared bedroom. Continuing my vacation seemed in such poor taste. But there was no possibility of going home. There didn’t seem to be much point in staying put. So, while the rest of you were glued to real-life horror, I marveled at the beauty of the Gold Pavilion and meditated before the enormous Daibatsu Buddha of Todaiji Temple.

I did finally get home, of course. From my seat, I could see a total of five people on a plane that was supposed to seat 500. All of them were soldiers returning from US bases in Okinawa and elsewhere. It was like I had a military escort. Everywhere else, people were terrified of flying, but I had never felt so safe on an airplane.

We landed on a broken nation trying very hard to pretend it was whole. Everyone spoke casually but incessantly about news and events I had missed. It still feels as though the entire country attended a private funeral to which I had not been invited. There was something it was like to be here then, and I had not been a part of it.

That was never more apparent than a year and a half later, when, driving to work, I watched crowds on street corners enthusiastically waving flags and yellow ribbons in support of a war predicated entirely on a lie. We’d been wounded, and rather than reflecting on our role in the tragedy, we wanted to hurt someone. It didn't much matter who. I looked around and realized I had nothing in common with you all anymore. The country I grew up in was gone. We were just the fleas inhabiting its corpse.

Millions died in the ensuing catastrophes, hundreds of times the number that died that day in New York, including untold numbers of children—untold because the Pentagon gives its soldiers standing orders never to count the civilian dead so there's no record to be leaked to the press or revealed in a FOIA request. I try not to think about their tiny bodies, still and lifeless in the rubble, or how they died not knowing who killed them, or why, how they never saw the missile or the drone that fired it, let alone the soldier that pulled the trigger, thousands of miles away. I try not to think of the absurdity of being killed for the crime of standing too close to someone carrying a cell phone with a SIM card that had at some point been used to make a call to a number flagged in a database.

It seems to me those worried about “murderbots” have greatly missed the point. We already have them. They look just like people.

The effect of September 11th on our collective psyche is almost impossible to overstate. Our leaders, so-called, were shocked and embarrassed into a paranoid schizophrenia from which they are unlikely ever to awaken. The enemy was everywhere, everyone: from the innocents imprisoned in Guantanamo to the soldiers tortured at Abu Ghraib, to all of us. Obsessed with “security”—whose is open to debate—they set about rationally constructing their own Death Star, an unprecedented surveillance-and-strike apparatus that, as Edward Snowden put it, “could not be meaningfully resisted.” It is, as far as anyone knows, now complete. Those who warned us of it—Snowden, Daniel Hale, Julian Assange—are in exile or prison.

Ten years ago, halfway between then and now, American soldiers shot and killed Osama bin Laden, removing the last reason for us to be in a country we nevertheless occupied for another decade. We spent twenty years in Afghanistan. An entire generation was born who’ve never not known American occupation. And everything we “built” collapsed in less than 12 hours.

Bin Laden is dead. We killed him. And yet, somehow I can't shake the feeling he won.

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In honor of the twin tragedies of 9/11 and our response, there was no chapter of ANACHRON this week and there is no picture of Henry attached to this newsletter.

Regular programming will resume on Tuesday with a new edition of the dystopian library. Make sure you’re signed up for the Almanac.

That’s it for this time. I’m so glad you’re here.

Nothing gave out. Like running out of breath while playing a long note, I kept struggling upward, but it was no good. I would always descend slowly in spite of myself.

It felt like I could go higher, that it was possible, but there was always something lacking. Like those dreams where you want to make it down the stairs, or simply across the room, but can't, I could never get to the clouds, nor even move at speed. I could only toil to a modest height, even as my face turned blue with effort.

It sounds awfully tragic, but it never felt that way. I never saw anyone else flying, for example. I was always alone. Nor did I have the sense that I was being left out, that somewhere around me, others were flying as I wasn’t. If anything, it seemed my ability was rare.

But I never got the meaning of it, if there was one.

Not that dreams are portents, at least not the way they’re presented in myths. But I suspect they are windows to the psyche. Still, peer in any random window and what you’ll most likely see is something mundane, the casual anxieties of life: work, love, money.

Keep peering, night after night, and occasionally you’ll witness something greater, maybe even something profound.

Even then, I suspect Jung was right and we’re the only true arbiters of our dreams, not palmists or interpreters, not witch doctors or psychologists. Only us. No one else is qualified.

People don’t like that. They want a formula. They want Google to tell them what it means that they dreamt they were drowning, or had sex with their mother.

On the one hand, I have no doubt that dreams about missed math tests or standing naked in class are about the usual kinds of social anxieties. I had a dream recently where I cracked a window to shoo some flies only to watch them flee every which way but out, which is a perfect metaphor for the frustrations of book marketing (not least that it’s the kind of thing that attracts flies).

Beyond that, I’m not sure there’s an equation: Dream(x) = Explanation(y).

Dreams are not vocabulary words, where every meaning can be tabulated in a desk reference. Imagine if we treated books that way, if we thought every possible story was reducible to a flowchart and to find the meaning in any story we only had to turn to the correct page in the manual.

I feel sad for the people that want that.

We forget sometimes that story is emergent. Stories are made of words, of vocabulary, but scramble any book and in ten thousand tries you’ll get nothing but gibberish. Words in a particular order convey something greater than the sum of their vocabulary in the same way that the atoms of you, rearranged in almost any other way, make nothing but ash.

Dreams are not stories—or rather they’re not narratives. Neither are they fragments. A dream isn’t a middle missing an end. It’s a mountain submerged by the sea. Potent and mysterious.

Our best understanding from the sciences tells us that consciousness is a kind of controlled hallucination, that we are not passive recipients of sense datum but actually architects of our own realities, actively constructing them from moment to moment.

Sanity, then, is that part of our controlled hallucination that we keep in common with others.

If that’s true, then the reason our dreams feel so real is not, as we often assume, because our brain does a wonderful job of simulating reality but because our reality simulates a dream.

In other words, what our brains do when they are awake is closer to what they do when they are asleep than it is to the world “out there.” We are each Vishnu, asleep on the coiled serpent, dreaming the world.1

One wonders what would happen if we woke.

The End of the World Almanac

I call it the Handbook of the Post-Factual Future, and it’s a sort of newsletter within a newsletter. This week, I finished a piece I’m especially proud of on the nature of disinformation.

The Fantastic Fiction of Rick Wayne

Everything I'm About to Say is a Lie

You get a message from your bank that warns you of a threat to your account and invites you to click on a link validating your personal information and/or updating your password. In this context, you're clearly suspicious, but phishing works by providing the right contextual clues such that those flying by at 90 mph, as normal people do on the internet, …

Read more

5 years ago · 4 likes · Rick Wayne

If you don’t already, you can get email notifications from the Almanac. Just go to:

Your Account

Toggle notifications by clicking the boxes. (Just don’t toggle them all.) You can also configure your favorite podcast app to listen to the audio.

ANACHRON

As always, there’s a new chapter of ANACHRON this week. For those following the story, Quinn and Ezra enter the anomaly and make a startling discovery.

The Fantastic Fiction of Rick Wayne

A N O M A L I E S

Quinn had seen the drainage tunnel from the air. A corrugated aluminum tube cut through a small rise and prevented a depression near the tracks from flooding. Foliage hung over the opening, which yawned in front of them, completely dark. Ezra turned on his hood light, and two rows of bright LEDs shown from either side of his forehead…

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5 years ago · Rick Wayne

And finally, here’s this week’s picture of Henry.

That’s it for this time. Thanks so much for being here.

First embarrassing admission

I have no idea how to break through in the attention economy. Put boobs in all my announcements, I guess.1

It’s genuinely humbling when your dog has three times as many followers in seven months as you’ve gotten in seven years of busting your balls.

In my corporate career, I used to teach my team about The Three-Foot Wall. Most professionals, especially most managers, surround themselves in a three-foot wall, which is high enough that you can’t walk up unimpeded but not so high that you can’t easily get over it.

Here’s the thing: most people don’t. I had employees walk into my office, hands waving excitedly as they described some great new product idea or cost-saving initiative they’d discovered. But as soon as I said, “Great, why don’t you call a meeting with the stakeholders and I’ll champion it,” you could practically watch them deflate.

Note: I never discouraged them. And I always offered my help. But in asking them to take a small positive action first—to step over a three-foot wall—I was able to separate those who were likely to follow through from those who were not.

I used to think people had a similar wall around their personal time. But these days, with a global telecommunication device in every pocket, we’re accessible to the world 24/7. There’s just no way to give attention even to a fraction of those who demonstrably deserve it, which means the wall around each of us is practically unscalable.

Second embarrassing admission

Despite taking years to write, Feast of Shadows didn’t sell. Add COVID on top of that, and Orine and I are struggling a bit. I’m writing cheap copy and building template websites and she’s working the 3 a.m. shift at FedEx.

Still, all things considered, our lives are pretty good. I mean, how could they not be when we have this guy?

But I have to do something different.

This is the first something different.

I moved my entire catalog online. Everything I’ve written under any pen name, including audiobooks, is here and accessible from any device.

As free subscribers, everyone continues to get news & notifications. I’m glad you’re here. You also get most chapters and some occasional freebies. If you haven’t, check out my latest book:

Shiny Button

Third embarrassing admission

I’d like to finish recording The Minus Faction in audio and start Science Crimes Division, but I can’t afford a professional voice actor. I’d do it myself, but I need the equipment: a reasonable microphone, a decent headset, a cheap boom, and maybe a pop filter. Call it 100 bucks.

I made a deal with my wife that I wouldn’t invest in anything that didn’t at least pay for itself. So naturally, I’m hoping enough people will subscribe.

Here’s what you get, now and in the future:

New Stuff Now

Serialized chapters from new, unpublished works-in-progress are posted every 5-7 days. Read the latest months before publication. The second chapter of ANACHRON is now up. I’ve got another ten in the bag, so we should be good all the way to the end of this book and into the next project, and so on.

Every Audiobook

Immediate access to all audio. Listen anywhere, on vacation or on your way to work, including from your favorite podcast app, with no limitations at a fraction of the cost of Audible.

Every eBook

Everything published under any pen name, both novels and short stories, available at any time on any device. Catch what you missed or read while you wait in line at the store—right from your browser without the need for specialty apps.

Discounts on paperbacks

Shipped to you at cost with no markup. Pick any paperback and pay what I pay.

Free digital copies

Any paid subscription entitles you to one free copy of any book in the format of your choice, plus every new release. Redeem now. Keep even if you unsubscribe.

And finally… I almost hate to say it, but for me, it’s definitely the most important:

Keep me writing

Because that’s not a given. Buying retail only helps the retailer. Since subscription dollars go directly to book expenses, you’ll also be supporting the independent artists and editors who help produce my books.

That’s a $280 total value for $2 a month…

One dollar if you buy a year. That’s less than a cup of coffee. And you can cancel anytime.

With more chapters (and hopefully more audio) posted every week, the value of your 200 cents will only increase.

Subscribe now

Why so cheap?

Because you’re buying direct. Including delivery fees, Amazon takes between 35% and 70% of every ebook and 80% of every audiobook.

If you buy the next book digitally from a retailer, for example, you’re giving about half of what you pay to corporations and the government. Your choice, I guess, but I’d rather it came to me.

Of course, Founding Members get whatever they want whenever they want it, and going forward, I’d like to thank each of them by name (or moniker, if they prefer) in the dedication of every new book.

Final embarrassing admission

I have no idea if this is going to work. I told Orine I was worried that even the folks most excited about my word vomit might be reluctant to subscribe if only because they’ve already read everything!

But I’m gonna keep trying new things. Such as shamelessly giving you puppy dog eyes on my way out the door…