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.”
In “Rewriting History with Artificial Intelligence” (June 23), I quoted one of the original AI architects saying,
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:
In my Bidey’s essay I first raised a political weatherfinger to the air:
That was also the month the Supreme Court crowned Trump our Sun God. Justice Sotomayor dissented:
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,
I wrote:
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:
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:
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.
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to bring an immediate cessation to the war. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years and will continue to do so, with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read all about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.
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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.
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