The Algorithm Won

"We are all Ice Road Truckers now, venturing out onto the frozen lake."

At 2 AM Wednesday, Fox News declared Donald Trump the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election. The other networks lagged because the ex-president had not yet secured the 270 Electoral College votes required, but with the win in Pennsylvania coming at that hour, Kamala Harris had no more paths to victory. She would have needed to run the board of undecided states, and in some of those Trump was leading the popular vote by hundreds of thousands.

I suspect many of my readers this past year did not fully grasp what I was talking about when I devoted endless columns to describing bright and colorful threads unraveling from the global cultural fabric. All year, I’ve described how AI was already molding the social landscape and what had happened to the public arena, democracies, and rational discourse as a result. On November 5, it blossomed. We struck the Singularity. We are now in its tractor beam.

In “Where can you find the greatest disinformation? X marks the spot” (March 31), I said that as people “spend by far the most time on social media… the kind of stuff they're consuming makes them feel the world is dangerous and stacked against them.” I closed that essay with the maxim: “Happiness equals reality minus smartphones.”

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In “Rewriting History with Artificial Intelligence” (June 23), I quoted one of the original AI architects saying,

We designed the learning algorithm that's a bit like designing the principle of evolution but when this learning algorithm then interacts with data it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things but we don't really understand exactly how they do those things…. They will be able to manipulate people, right? And these will be very good at convincing people because they'll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the political connivances. They'll know all that stuff. They'll know how to do it.

In “Weekend at Bidey’s” (July 7) I introduced you to the four billionaires who are shown in the image at the top of this post. These are four Silicon giants whose All-In Podcast is unabashed at trying to shift public opinion away from liberal democracy and towards the Valley’s grail: deregulation, tax cuts, and subsidies for the startup ecosystem. They were willing to invest some of their billions and all of their masterfully engineered influence to make that happen. And climate change? Not on their radar.

Among the mogul class’s truths-universally-acknowledged is the idea that money is best obtained via deregulation and tax cuts – and, in the case of, say, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, ever-more lucrative government contracts.

— Marina Hyde “Trump may become president again – but he’s already a useful idiot to the mega rich” The Guardian (Nov 1, 2024)

According to an analysis at the University of Massachusetts, a one percent carbon tax on Musk, who has 11 children, would provide enough money to boost global climate adaption funding for all underdeveloping countries—the places most vulnerable to disastrous heatwaves, floods and droughts unleashed by rising temperatures—by 10 percent. While endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy, who labeled climate change a “hoax,” Musk’s opinion of the existential climate risk was best expressed in his X-livestream with Trump in August:

Eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past 1,000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range. We’re adding, I think about roughly 2 parts per million per year. So, I mean, it still gives us, so what it means is like, we still have quite a bit of time. We don’t need to rush.

In my Bidey’s essay I first raised a political weatherfinger to the air:

On Saturday I went to the farmers market in the small town of Ethridge, Tennessee and asked a vendor selling Trump 2024/MAGA paraphernalia–hats, flags, doormats–how sales have been going since the debate. He said he could barely keep up and wished he had bought more inventory. While we were speaking, a father accompanied by three young sons bought four Trump 2024 baseball caps with camo coloring. I don’t think I need to wait for the polls.

That was also the month the Supreme Court crowned Trump our Sun God. Justice Sotomayor dissented:

Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation.

I closed the post with these words, “To say that this is a crisis striking at the heart of the American experiment seems absurdly understated. These past few days may well augur the end of the American experiment.”

I know that seems a bit over the top, but the following week, in “Thinking Like a Mob” (July 14), I doubled down, quoting Carl Jung,

Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.

I wrote:

Alone, confused and battered by waves of misinformation, a population under an attack of menticide descends into a hopeless and vulnerable state. The never-ending stream of falsehoods turns minds once capable of rational thought into playhouses of irrational forces and with chaos swirling around them. Writes Meerloo: “Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of ‘the enemy,’ imagined to be ‘in our midst.’

I described mob mentality again in “Roasting Marshmallows as Rowling Burns” (July 28), and then applied the lessons gathered over the preceding months to red rural America in “The Great Election Bake-Off 2024,” (August 25), “Trumping DeTocqueville,” (Sep 1), “Got Dem Stump-Bustin’ SkidPro Summertime Blues,” (Sep 8), “The Ministry of Disruption,” (Sep 15), and in late October’s miniseries, “Revenge of the Luddites.”

On January 20, we may see Elon Musk installed as Federal Efficiency Czar, tasked with disassembling the bureaucracy and cutting the budget by two trillion the first year. With both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, Musk will have the guns to do it. Whether Musk can keep his attention focused that long is questionable. Guardian columnist Marina Hyde writes:

The only billionaire who doesn’t quite fit in the gang is Elon Musk. My gut says the other billionaires are not at all sure about Musk. At the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference, that annual retreat for the point-nought-nought-nought-nought-nought per cent, you suspect none of them would like to get stuck in the barefoot yurt with Elon. He’s weird, he’s creepy (but not in the Monty Burns way they’ve all legitimised), and – this is the worst part – he comes off like he might somehow take their money. Not clear how, just … vibes. His billionaire vibes are off. I would kill to hear what they say about him in the mogul phone call circle. At the very least I expect Elon to one day make an aggressive attempt to acquire WhatsApp off Mark Zuckerberg, purely so he can read all their messages slagging him off.

Whether that earns Marina a shared cell at HM Prison Belmarsh remains to be seen. President Cobblepot is not just the mayor of Gotham now. He is the world’s Emperor.

After describing how extreme weather has become a standard pattern, in “The Day After Next Week” (May 19), I wrote:

Strangely enough, I don’t feel despair. Perhaps I am just accustomed to the horror in the same way I am inured to the deaths of so many old friends, but I don’t think so. I think it gives me a chance to do something heroic in my life, which gets me out of bed in the morning. There is a great change underway. It will transform everything. We will not continue to destroy everything we touch. We will be forced into finding harmony with nature. Our economic systems will become biophysically sustainable and regenerative. We will, perforce, take carbon from the atmosphere and ocean, make energy, and then bury that carbon in the ground. We will honor the sun and respect it. We will return to the original instructions.

I only pray we do it in time.

Would I still write that, after last night?

Yes, I would.

We just have to get through this rough patch right ahead. Stay tuned. It will be cathartic.

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#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

These inspiring people are doing essential work and will be instrumental for what happens during and after the current wars in terms of reconstruction, regeneration and applying the principles, strategies and techniques of permaculture design. This campaign will raise funds to cover scholarships and travel expenses for nine remarkable changemakers from the Levant (four from Palestine, four from Lebanon, and one from Syria) and one from France to attend the Permaculture Teacher Training with Focus on Refugees (PTT4R) in Catalunya, Spain this November, 2024. They are close to their goal. Maybe your donation can push this past the mark.