In my post yesterday I referenced progressive agriculture models that I’ve been learning about. Chief among those in my mind is permaculture. Permaculture was developed and coined as a term by David Holmgren, then a graduate student, and his professor Bill Mollison in Australia in 1978. Permaculture uses a holistic systems thinking model which seeks to understand and mimic nature while working to create a ‘permanent agriculture’. A way of living with the land and growing food which is not only sustainable but regenerates damaged land, captures carbon and renews the environment, while taking care of humans and animals. It’s a beautiful concept and people have been successfully putting it into action around the world for the past forty years. When I first started to learn about it I was freaking out about peak oil. I remember one night before dawn taking a taxi back from my job editing video of baseball games in New York City. I was driving up the West Side Highway in Manhattan and looking at the blazingly lit, empty buildings of the New York City and New Jersey skylines. Those iconic images we love to look at of cities at night with their twinkling lights, when we look at it from an energy perspective are sort of shocking. The people are all asleep! Why is the city lit up like this? This momentary insight got me into thinking about energy and the concept of ‘peak oil’ was surfing the zeitgeist at the time. Websites with terms like ‘die off’ and ‘collapse’ in their title were capturing peoples attention and sowing a narrative of the collapse of western society.

Being a new father gave me a new perspective on the idea of societal collapse. I might die, but my descendants would have to survive in this degraded environment. I started studying homesteading, survivalism and various threads of people retreating from society and living off the land. My first impulse was that I needed to get a bunch of guns and dogs and go build a fort. My family were horrified. Interestingly, in the Venn diagram of people who think the world is going to end there is a large degree of overlap between people with what we’d consider ‘left wing’ politics, (mostly people with hippie back to the land view) and right wing survivalists, or ‘preppers’ as they call themselves (people who are preparing for the collapse). One thing that both sides agreed upon was this Australian style of farming and living called permaculture. It came up again and again in the various podcasts I was listening to and I became interested, and studied it. I never did move to the forest and build a fort, farm, or really take any specific action about any of it. Life continued, being a young parent (a musician at the time) was incredibly busy and distracting and my focus shifted back to daily urban capitalist survival.

Lately, for reasons I’d be hard pressed to articulate (the general apocalyptic climate?) I’ve been thinking about these things again. Nowadays YouTube is absolutely filled with people around the world doing these kinds of things and making videos about them and I find it very relaxing after working on abstract computer marketing problems to sit back on the couch and watch some guy in California explain how he built his chicken coop out of salvaged materials. Last night I watched a video that I feel compelled to share, and offer some commentary on. It’s a long one (~90 mins) so I recognize most people won’t watch it, so I’ll try to offer a few thoughts and summarize a bit.

The video is an interview with David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture. In it, he talks about a few very important concepts in my opinion. The first is the concept of “energy descent”. The idea here is that the era that we have been living in for the past few hundred years was massively accelerated by access to ‘free’ energy in the form of fossil fuels. In a sense, contemporary post-Enlightment western civilization has been built on a kind of energy bubble. Access to free energy has enabled this incredibly rapid acceleration and expansion of human activity, technological development and overall complexity. As many of us are aware, fossil fuels are finite and this bubble era may well be coming to a close. The fact that it is becoming economically viable to go after increasingly difficult to access sources of energy like tar sands tells us that the fossil fuel industry may be beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel. As this process of declining returns in the excavation and exploitation of fossil fuels continues, we will see a contraction in available energy which will trigger a contraction in economic growth. Since our economic system is essentially predicated on the idea of endless and unlimited growth, ignoring externalized costs to anything that can’t be measured economically, this will trigger an economic contraction as well. How extreme and how sudden this contraction will be is a big question to which we don’t know the answer.

In previous posts I’ve talked about the techno-optimist green tech utopian view that the progress of technology will continue to accelerate and outpace our dependence on fossil fuels. Holmgren address this view in the interview pointing out that for solar panels, for example, to go exponential as the tech people predict, we will need to arrive at a point where the infrastructure used to create them is not subsidized by fossil fuels. Currently we are not there. So the current acceleration in solar and green tech is still operating on a fossil fuel energy subsidy. If that subsidy is removed, the economic cost of those things will become much higher, which will stunt the current curve that they are on. In an earlier post I referenced Moore’s law about increasing semiconductor capacity. This is a law that has been established during the fossil fuel bubble, whether it will hold true in an era of more scarce energy without fossil fuels remains to be seen. The question becomes then whether we have enough of a fossil fuel runway to accelerate the progress of renewable energy enough to launch them into an independent and self-propelling state. Time will tell.

The energy descent that Holmgren predicts is a future in which global society begins to reduce it’s energy consumption as energy supplies decrease. Those decreases may either be a gradual drift downward to a less energy consumptive future or a more step wise process of rapid declines in the form of crises, followed by periods of stabilization. This process will occur in parallel with the ongoing process of climate change, which will also be disruptive to an unknown extent. Holmgren goes through multiple potential scenarios which consider both our progress in reducing energy consumption and the severity and rapidity of climate change. Each scenario is a mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes, for example in one scenario we may see energy descent trigger an economic crisis, which stops a great deal of economic activity and thereby slows carbon emissions, a kind of self regulating situation. There is also the possibility that climate change will not at this point be slowed by a reduction in carbon emissions and has already entered an irreversible feedback loop. As he points out, the point of scenario planning is to discover useful opportunities for action. Holmgren advocates a process of withdrawal from the global economy into a more localized and non-monetary economy in which individuals specialize in certain areas and develop useful skills, although to a lesser extent than the total specialization capitalism demands, while developing skills like growing food, repairing their own homes and generally becoming more self-sufficient. For me Holmgren’s thinking is probably some of the most sane and reasonable response to our contemporary apocalyptic storm clouds. If any of these are things which you think about late at night like me, I strongly encourage you to check out the interview and learn more.

Image: Barnhouse settlement by Martin McCarthy (Tumulus)

Lately along with thinking about tiny houses I’ve also been thinking about various sustainable and alternative farming techniques. Many of the deep patterns of contemporary human civilization began to form with the development of agriculture. The movement away from hunting and gathering and living in mobile nomadic bands to staying in one place and domesticating the land and animals lead to concepts of private property and hierarchical human societies. This was called the Neolithic Revolution, from Wikipedia:

“These developments, sometimes called the Neolithic package, provided the basis for centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. writing), densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture, and property ownership. The earliest known civilization developed in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (c. 6,500 BP); its emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.[7]”

What a list! The more predictable ability to produce food clothing and shelter allowed humans to move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and begin to create new civilizational technologies, like cities. Without this development our contemporary society wouldn’t exist. But looking over that list we can recognize the seeds of many of the modern forces of alienation and destructive human behavior. Centralization of power into hierarchies in my opinion being chief among them. In order to create efficiencies of scale and stability we ceded individual and small group autonomy to huge political and economic hierarchies, which in many cases produce terribly unequal distributions of influence and resources. My hope is that hierarchy and centralization will prove to be outdated technologies which we can overcome, like the fossil fuel powered internal combustion engine. Centralized systems are rigid and prompt rent seeking, authoritarianism and misguided attempts to organize the periphery from the center. With the explosive acceleration of decentralizing technologies like the internet, renewable energy and sophisticated sustainable agriculture my hope is that we can wrest back some of the control we’ve granted to these entities and usher in a new era of more localized autonomy and decision making both within cities and outside them.

One of the trends I see as hopeful in this regard is the emergence of cities as a more prominent social unit. When the current occupant of the American White House refused to ratify the Paris climate change accord we saw a number of mayors of cities worldwide stepping forward to say that they would instead, including Pittsburgh and my home of New York City. We increasingly see cities beginning to create their own international foreign policy. This seems like an inevitable trend as populations continue to urbanize and economic and political power concentrates in cities. Perhaps we can see a rebalancing of power from the nation state down to the level of the region and municipality, smaller units of government in which citizens can interact more directly and have their needs better met. Richard Florida has written on this subject and I find his thoughts about it illuminating, you can read some here.

In the long span of human history we may discover that centralization was a necessary evil required by the need for food security, and then in support of information density in cities. As we move into the next stage of human history and unlock new technologies in food, energy, information and communication my hope is that it becomes possible for humans to become more loosely tethered to the system and reassert their individuality and agency in order to live more productive and less alienated lives.

This video crossed my desk last night and I found it worth discussing. Promethean AI is a startup company that is developing tools for game artists and virtual world builders which uses AI to do a kind of semantic automated set decoration. There’s a demand in the game industry for larger and larger and more and more detailed worlds, while at the same time the price consumers are willing to pay for these types of games has plateaued. This is pushing the industry in the direction of automated art creation. Promethean AI is in the category of what I think of as art prosthetics or could be analogous to an art bicycle. It’s still human directed, but it amplifies the input of the human and multiplies it. In many ways this is the fundamental purpose of computers, but up until now the directions in which computers could amplify human effort were largely linear and literal. With the recent accelerating development of AI technologies we begin to see tools like what Promethean is building, tools imbued with semantic meaning, tools which are not dumb robots that will run into a wall if sent in the wrong directions but tools which can make inferences and connections based on trained data sets. Tools which can learn and understand, and work along human like vectors of meaning. In the video we see the tool given a set of adjectives ’80s, messy, nerdy’ and it then seeks through it’s database for pre-created art assets which it uses to populate the environment. It places them in sensible locations, rotated properly and aligned with floors, desks and walls. This then allows a human artist to go in and fine tune the output, perhaps delete or adjust non-sequiturs, create variations where needed. It places the human artist in a kind of supervisory role over the robot artist.

This type of technology is coming on fast and will permeate many areas of human endeavor. The ramifications of this will be that game productions will grow bigger I think, rather than scaling back on human labor. More output will be produced with less human input. This will also have an interesting enabling effect for small teams. Teams who are creative and resourceful and leverage AI authoring tools will be able to create works that in the past only could have been produced by larger teams. I think for the foreseeable future of AI we will see these type of synergistic relationships between humans and machine agents in which machine agents create output and humans shape and edit that output.

When talking about art, I think it’s important to make distinction between the artist and the technician. The artist is the decider, the conceptualizer, the maker of statements and meaning. The technician is the executor, the hands on person, the molder of the clay. In the onrushing AI future the role of the technician will fade and become marginalized. Creating competent technical reproductions will be trivialized by AI, and the role of the artist will be the one that survives. Until we reach the goal of general intelligence with AI, it’s incredibly unlikely that AI will ever be able to produce art with any significant human resonance. In fact I wonder if this ever will happen at all, since human intelligence is a product of the competing lizard-like amygdala and logical neocortex. Will AI research take the path of mimicing the evolution of animal consciousness and encode all the messy lizard behavior of the amygdala into general AI? I think this is the only thing that would allow AI to produce work with anything that felt like human emotion. Of course general AI which develops along a different vector might very well be able to produce works of art which were resonant to other beings of it’s kind, bypassing the messy hormonal surges of human emotion entirely. Regardless there are interesting times ahead.

PS: Apologies to my loyal daily readers that I missed a post yesterday, we had visitors from New York and my house was filled with 8 and 9 year old boys all day. Joyful mayhem.

Image by Ken Douglas

This morning and yesterday just felt like an absolute wall of resistance. Berlin is falling into it’s grey, damp and dark winter pattern that is my least favorite thing about it. The trip to school with my son and my trip back alone was disrupted by transit issues and so I spent a lot of time standing in the cold waiting and feeling frustrated. In those moments I try to reflect, unclench and be present but it’s hard to do when I’m cold. Stifling heat makes me sluggish and maybe a bit irritable but cold really eats at me. I guess I’m a true summer baby.

Facing the blank page feels like a chore today. However, I do have a lovely, sublime and dark William Basinski piece to share, so maybe we’ll take a moment to enjoy that together.

Basinski’s music inspires poetic commentary from his fans on YouTube. It’s very interesting to see how certain special pieces of music inspire people to open up to strangers on the internet.

Scale The Fretboard writes “This song like waiting for a bus that never comes.” Very appropos for my morning experience and evocative of the timelessness Basinski’s work evokes. That feeling of floating outside time, though for me the experience is different from waiting. Endymion766, 3 years ago, writes “It’s the sound of dread that there may be no gods.” Jacob Wruebel describes it as “the sound of the abyss”. Junie Marin compares it to that classic of video game fog horror Silent Hill. Interestingly for me the piece is somber and beautiful but I don’t detect darkness, more a kind of sublime and vast melancholy. Basinski reminds us that slowing down and clearing things away can open huge spaces inside us.

As much as I feel ambivalent and critical about YouTube and our relationship to similar content curation algorithms, I discovered Basinski through YouTube, and am much richer for it. Experiencing it in the strange environment of the internet is quite different from having sought it out, downloaded it or bought a record or CD. There’s a light, loosely connected relationship to the music which in many cases renders music disposable. In the case of Basinski however I kept returning again and again. Partially this has to do with the way it fits into my life. I’m listening now while I’m writing and I find it’s perfect for putting me in a certain state. This idea of ‘useful’ music or music which fits into certain moments activities is one I’m quite interested in but also a bit suspicious of. It feels like a step removed from elevator music, which Basinski is emphatically not. I think one distinction is that certain music I use to change my mood in a certain context. If I’m feeling a certain way and want to direct my energy and emotions along a certain path I choose certain pieces of music. For writing and thinking at the computer, Basinski is perfect. For walking around and keeping warm while trying to get home, I’ve been listening to a lot of Atlanta trap artists Gunna and Lil Baby, who are both getting a lot of (deserved) attention and are great. So perhaps this is a useful way to think about it, strong music we put on not as background but as a kind of emotional lighting, to change the scene and the way we feel. Basinski definitely works that way for me, and I’m grateful for it.

Image: a tiny house designed by Jay Shafer

As a person who has grown up my entire life in cities I think I am particularly vulnerable to the myth of ‘the peaceful life in the country side’. I always notice that whenever I go (admittedly always on vacation) out of the city I feel much more relaxed, and it feels good on some deep level to be around plants and away from concrete and the constant roar of the city. So I have a persistent fantasy of leaving it all behind and going to live in the countryside. I’m sure this would be a rude awakening for me if it actually happened, but the fantasy persists.

Periodically I indulge the fantasy and spend time watching YouTube videos about related topics. One of my favorite topics is tiny houses and the people who live in them. In western culture Henry Thoreau and Walden are a central touch point for the allure of voluntary simple living. Thoreau and his ideas seem to pop up cyclically in the culture, taking on various manifestations, including some of the recent trends around minimalism. The contemporary tiny house movement is a fairly recent development in this continuum, over the past 20 or 30 years, with one recent source of origination credited to artist and house designer Jay Shafer. He was a poor artist and decided to build a tiny living structure on the bed of a trailer that could be towed by a car or truck. Of course poor people around the world have been living in prefabricated mobile homes for generations. We even have a pejorative slur for them in the US: “trailer trash”. Shafer’s and the tiny house movement’s innovation is to position tiny house living as an ethical and aesthetic statement about minimalism and freedom, as opposed to framing it around poverty or lack.  As such it appeals strongly to urban dwellers who are feeling overwhelmed by the rat race of contemporary life. It’s worth noting that in fact Shafer went through periods of homelessness and that the tiny house movement has now gotten involved with addressing the homelessness epidemic on the west cost of the USA, so there are points of interconnection.

Over the past five years I’ve gone through a number of significant life transitions and upheavals and have come to realize that I really don’t need very much at all to live, in terms of possessions, and actually living with less is generally a lighter and more pleasant feeling. Moving to Berlin was again a kind of squeezing through the eye of the needle in which I moved with only 6 large (and heavy) cardboard boxes on the airplane. I got a lot of second hand furniture and appliances on arrival here and a year later am living comfortably with a minimalist but not particularly austere setup. So I find the concept of getting rid of stuff and keeping things simple appealing.

Being a family man there is a limit to how minimalist I can become, and in fact a huge amount of what I brought with me from the US was kids toys and stuffed animals. For me minimalism is an adult choice and not one I want to excessively impose on my kids, though I do try to limit the random buying of stuff that modern kids seem to thrive on and feel entitled to. Given my current family situation I think it will be some time before I can make any kind of significant shift in my lifestyle, towards this kind of more nomadic and simple existence, but long term I think that’s the way I’m trending. I really have no desire to accumulate a mountain of stuff or a big house as I find it’s usually just a burden to move around, store, organize and manage. The benefit of frequent uprootings is that you realize that anything you bring into your life you’ll end up being forced to carry with you.

Image: Farewell, Drawing of JG Ballard by his daughter Fay Ballard

One of the major tensions in my life is between my strong desire for self-expression, to be an artist and the daily realities of survival. I spend the overwhelming majority of my time either earning income at my job or taking care of my two sons. Me and their mother are not together and so I spend a good amount of time doing solo child rearing. This leaves precious little time for the things I find individually meaningful, my own creative works. It’s a painful situation for me and one I am always wrestling with. A lot of my turning over ideas about artistic process, productivity and so on is all a thinly veiled circling around this central challenge in my life. I spent the day today with my sons traveling out to the misty gray forest outside Berlin and building a fort out of sticks. It was great, and these type of activities are some of the only ones that tie me back to reality away from a screen, but at the same time I feel the gnawing tension of ‘when will I have time for myself?’ It feels petty, ungrateful and self-centered to feel this way, much less to admit it publicly. Parenting is one of those social high wire acts over the abyss of shame. There is always an audience, real or imagined, there to judge your parenting. After going to the forest I put the kids in front of the video games and took a bath. I was raised without being allowed to watch television at all so every time I let the kids watch TV so that I can sleep an hour longer, or relax, or work, I feel guilty. The further I go down this path the better I get at detecting and deflecting these kind of thoughts, but it’s a constant process. I find it far more easy these days to tell other people who offer unsolicited parenting advice to politely fuck off, but the internal voice is harder.

I am subscribed to Maria Popova’s newsletter for her excellent site Brain Pickings. I highly recommend both the site and the newsletter if you’re not familiar. She is intimidatingly intelligent, well read and apparently works like a machine so it’s unsurprising that her output is so good. This lead me down a small rabbit hole of Popova’s writings about the letters and life of Georgia O’Keefe, the American painter. O’Keefe is one of those people who was apparently relentless in her desire to express herself and live life on her own terms, choosing later in life to live in solitude with her dog in order to focus and work intensely on her paintings. Reading the letters she wrote to friends, writers and artists you get this wonderful clear sense of a singleminded and determined person. Being an egomaniac (does everyone do this?) I of course compare myself to her unfavorably. I am unfocused, pulled in multiple directions, scattered and shattered. Making no progress. This lead me to go down a further rabbit hole of trying to find artists I admired who had been parents or more specifically, single parents. This is of course weird and embarassing to admit that one does this. It’s like Googling your own name. People do it, but don’t admit to it.

This search however, via an article by Hari Kunzru, turned up the name of one of my heroes: JG Ballard. Ballard, for those unfamiliar, is a British science fiction writer who wrote some of the strangest and most modern feeling SF works of the 20th century. He shifted the focus of science fiction from rocket ships and robots to sexualized car crashes and empty swimming pools. He was singular and brilliantly shameless and had a major impact on me, particularly in my young adult life. I recommend you start with Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island if you want to get a very strange flavor of what he was about. The detail that I learned and that stupidly was a wonderful consolation to me was that Ballard was a single father raising three kids, and still managed to write his strange books. Tragically his wife died of pneumonia while the family was on vacation in Spain when his oldest daughter was 7, and he raised the children on his own from then on. He continued writing his novels and by all posthumous indications lived both a happy familial and creative life. Not only was Ballard successful in the literary sense but he was boldly experimental and creative, with a true sense of unique creative vision. On his family life, he wrote that he and the kids raised each other, over those years, which is a beautiful sentiment which I can relate to a great deal. To learn that he was able to thread the needle of being both a good artist and a parent on his own was something I found personally very encouraging.

Image by Sparth

I love a good apocalypse as much as the next person. One of my favorites is Paolo Bacigalupi’s water scarcity sci-fi “The Water Knife”. In the novel the western US is quickly turning back into a desert and states have devolved into warring nation states, fighting over water rights. It’s a compelling story and in light of the current trends in climate change and politics, feels plausible. On the other hand, we have people pushing more ambivalent narratives, like the post-scarcity narratives of Doctorow’s Walkaway, or the amazing community focused world building of John Scalzi’s Metatropolis collection. Both feature apocalyptic components but offer more hopeful visions of people organizing in a world where ubiquitous cheap tech enables more collaborative communalist and decentralized modes of living. I find these very inspiring. I should probably write more about Metatropolis specifically since it’s wonderful and I keep coming back to it’s ideas. But both worlds are about communalist societies arising amidst the wreckage of eco-disaster, wealth inequality and surveillance capitalism. So bittersweet to say the least.

Then we have the more full blast utopianism of someone like the brilliant Iain M. Banks and his Culture series of loosely linked novels, where we visit a utopian future in which AI, matter-as-software and limitless energy have created fully automated luxury communism. Everyone lives wonderfully and does whatever they want, against the backdrop of the cosmos. Banks is a wonderful writer and the books are funny, sometimes harrowing, cracklingly intelligent and tremendously enjoyable. Since Banks lamentably early and fairly recent passing in 2013 I’ve revisited almost all of them and continue to draw great pleasure from visiting his worlds. This thread of post-scarcity techno utopia has been picked up by the technological masters of the universe of Silicon Valley, with people like Elon Musk claiming Banks as an influence, and even citing him in discussions about his personal politics and about socialism. I find this baffling, but I digress. One of the people tugging on this thread of techno utopianism is Peter Diamandis who is the founder of the X Prize Foundation and a cofounder of the science fictionally named Singularity University.

Diamandis believes that because science and engineering have all become digitized the pace of technological progress should now follow Moore’s law, the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. This doubling of computation capacity unlocks and accelerates the pace of technological change, which creates a kind of positive feedback loop. The faster the underlying computational power increases, the faster the pace of progress increases. And if we observe recent history with any kind of detachment, looking for example at the difference between the pre and post smartphone eras, we can see that each of these leaps forward in technical capacity lays the basis for a whole explosion of technological advances which leverage it. I recently watched a documentary on Diamandis which I’ll link to in which they show a kind of cross section of tech projects in multiple areas, from increasingly powerful low cost, thin and flexible solar panels to a farm which grows food in the Sahara by using solar energy to desalinate sea water. The implication is, we may be approaching an era in which energy and computational power become ubiquitous and unlimited. With these two come the capacity to learn, produce food to feed the entire world, decentralize centralized networks and usher in a radically different reality.

So which is more believable? I can feel in my head a fight for the narrative of the future. Is it the unbounded techno utopia of Banks’ Culture? Or the feudalist cutthroat scrabbling over water depicted in Bacigalupi’s novel? Or some combination of both? It’s fully possible that the rich develop this technology, hoard it for themselves and retreat into fortresses while the rest of the world falls into a dark age, or that we go through some kind of more complex soft apocalypse transition, or somehow we are able to organize and overthrow the oligarchs who currently sit atop the world and experience a new era of distributed prosperity. The mind loves a binary, and so there’s always the temptation to collapse into one narrative or the other. In fact we may well see some version of all of the above, unequally distributed between the global north and south for example, or across lines of class, or nation, or education. As Gibson quips, the future is here but unevenly distributed. At the moment I’m trying to keep it all in my mind, and not succumb to the numb fatalism of apocalypse or the giddy utopianism of the technocrats. We’ll see what happens.

Image: Abstract Landscape GAN, Generative artwork by robbiebarrat

As may be clear from anyone who’s reading these posts, it’s not fully clear what’s going on here, certainly not to me. The goals I’m aware of are to form a habit of writing and thinking, and to do it publicly. I enjoy writing quite a bit, and in the internet age of course we don’t need to ask anyone to pick us in order to do writing. No one needs to accept our article for a magazine or publisher, and we don’t necessarily have to write anything useful for a large audience. So we have the luxury of writing publicly, reaching a small group of people who may be interested, and figuring it out as we go. No sheets of paper or printing presses were harmed in the production of these words. I grew up around writers, and something I was always taught was that it was impolite to ask writers how their writing is going. The answer is almost always badly. If for some reason it’s going well, they’ll probably tell you. Writing can be hard it’s true, particularly when it’s tied to our identity and self-worth. I am emphatically not a writer, and so writing this stuff is low stakes for me. That may be why I like doing it. At the moment my self-identity is caught up in my game project Monarch Black, and that’s probably why I haven’t worked on it seriously in a year, but I can write these blog posts every day. Funny how that works.

This points to an interesting fact, which is the more we build up this idea of self-identity around a project or process like writing or making games, the harder it gets. If I think of myself as an independent game designer, and that’s the thing I’m proud to be, somehow that work takes on existential stakes and becomes much more difficult. One model I like for writing is that of the journalist writing a column or filing copy every day. Journalists never get writers block. The copy must get filed by a regularly occurring deadline and so it gets written. So that’s one way I think about these posts. Journalistic dispatches covering the latest news of what’s going on in my brain. That sort of implies that my thoughts are newsworthy, which in my opinion they are not. But I like the idea that I am checking in daily, filing my copy and moving on. It’s a workmanlike process, not some tortured artistic activity. I don’t need any more of those, thanks.

If nothing else the process of writing daily is pretty enjoyable, and gives me a minor feeling of having accomplished something every day, which my salaried work does not always give me. Working as a manager I spend a lot of time communicating, writing emails, sitting in meetings and this does not always fill me with the satisfaction of a job well done, whereas in this case I can at least point to some words and say “I made those.” Apparently making things regularly is something I need and find satisfying, and as it turns out this type of writing is a pretty direct and accessible way to do it.

This music has nothing to do with the post, but I was listening to it while I wrote it, and I recommend it, it’s very nice.

Image: Still from “The Animatrix – World Record”

When I first saw film The Matrix, I was annoyed by it, and particularly by the reactions of the friends who I saw it with who thought it was so mindblowing. At the time I saw it as a pastiche of existing cyberpunk aesthetic cliches with a kind of high school solopsist ‘what if none of this is real maaaaaan?’ attitude. Decades later, I see it differently. The Matrix plunged deeply into the popular psyche and injected a whole vocabulary of memes for thinking about reality and subjectivity that are still vital and viral to this day. On the internet the term ‘red pill’ has taken on charged political meaning with right wing propoagandists using it as a verb to describe indoctrinating people into their reactionary ideology. Captains of industry like Elon Musk argue seriously that the probability that we are in fact living in a simulation is high and presumably act accordingly, shaping contemporary reality.

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether this is true or not, but do subscribe to the notion that reality is apprehended through the senses and that what happens during the process determines our experience of it. I’m agnostic about the existence of a ‘base reality’ as I have, to my knowledge, no equipment to measure it one way or another. There are a few lines of thought about reality and experience I find very useful though. The first is Buddhism, which is the closest I have to personal religion or spiritual practice. I don’t practice in an organized sense but if pressed to define a set of spiritual beliefs I adhere to, that’s it. As a result I practice meditation, attempt to be compassionate and believe that I am ultimately responsible for whether I suffer or not as I encounter reality. We all will encounter obstacles, negative feedback or sources of pain in our life, but studying Buddhist teaching (and living life for 39 years) has lead me to believe that we do have a role in deciding how to respond to those inputs. We can choose to thrash, resist and be miserable, or we can observe, accept and move through the discomfort. This has been a very useful idea for me.

A second thread, that has some relation to the first, but is less of an organized system of thinking is the view that ‘reality is negotiable’. It’s easy for us, particularly in the face of harsh experience to feel crushed by an implacable reality. Reality can feel static and oppressive. But through studying a whole host of dynamic and exceptional people I have come to believe that in fact reality is much more plastic and malleable than it appears. I think this orientation or belief is a pretty critical one in terms of believing that it’s possible to find freedom, peace and happiness in life. If we simply accept the miserable narrative that is frequently thrust upon us by others, or by the system and it’s propagandists, we are trapped. Seth Godin relates a disturbing anecdote about a dog with an invisible fence, the dog wears a shock collar and when it crosses an invisible line, it receives a shock. It learns quickly to stay within the invisible boundaries. Soon, the fence is switched off, but the dog, having been subject to potent operant conditioning, never leaves the bounds. Do we see ourselves here?

In many ways I feel there is a battle in my head between the powerful operant conditioning which we are subjected to by school, family and society via the media and this other belief, the belief in the possibility for a flexible reality. In fact, as we engage with reality we learn that often there is no electric fence there and that to cross certain boundaries actually requires minimal effort, only a different perspective. There was an off-shoot film, or collection of animated shorts, from The Matrix, called the Animatrix. It’s wonderful and many of the world’s best animators and directors were commissioned to provide episodes. One episode is particularly memorable for me in this context, called “World Record”, directed by Takeshi Koike with a screenplay by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. In it a runner is competing in the Olympics and through an effort of will, basically transcends the bounds of apparent reality and temporarily breaks free of the simulation, while setting a running world record. In the sinister narrative of The Matrix, he is captured and suppressed, his memory erased by The Agents, who are the AI police in charge of maintaining thought control. But this image of someone breaking through the bounds of the consensus reality to do extraordinary things is very resonant to me, and I think truer than many people think.

The regard in which I think the story rings false is that the runner breaks out of the matrix through extreme effort. In fact I think that escaping the confining paradigm is not achieved through extreme effort but rather through lateral thinking, and a willingness to not do that which others do. Perhaps we could interpret the physical effort in the story as a metaphor for the emotional effort of defying the social consensus. This is can be hard as almost all of us feel a great deal of fear and anxiety at the threat of breaking social consensus and being ostracized from the group. When I am trying to find a way to move my life to the next plateau, or to change, I often think of this short film. How am I allowing myself to be constrained? What would it look like to break the matrix and defy gravity?