Science Fiction, news, views, blues... and amuses...

Here's a Sci Fi roundup to offer a breather from Earthly troubles.

For starters...  We’re watching the excellent Amazon Prime show COUNTERPART. Two parallel worlds divided in 1982. They remained similar til one of them lost half a billion people to a flu that they blamed on the other world. Some creepily prescient scenes re masks and distancing and paranoia. Truly excellent actors and scripting.

And yes, pandemics have been common in science fiction. From PLAGUE YEAR about a nanomachine apocalypse (by the late Jeff Carlson: very worthwhile) all the way back to Mary Shelley's THE LAST MAN. My own "The Giving Plague" was guardedly optimistic about infectious diseases coming to terms with their hosts. In HEART OF THE COMET the physician on an expedition to Halley had the job of regularly releasing "challenge diseases" to keep crew healthy.

Here's a kewl little piece on 5 Great Books That Show The Range Of Science Fiction. Well, that’s four bright up-and-comers and one old fart. 

And the brilliant young sci fi writer S.B. Divya (author of RunTime) and I interviewed each other for the magazine of our alma mater, Caltech, in this fine older piece.

The mighty Annalee Newitz offers us an interesting article about how some recent science fiction has featured riffs about the “dismal science”… economics. It’s entertaining, though it focuses mostly on recent fixations. Even the excellent and more-serious-than-average series THE EXPANSE is economically silly. (Like there’s grinding poverty when they've accessed that much automation and unlimited asteroidal resources? How many babies would human women have to make, in just two centuries, in order Malthus-away that kind of wealth-generating capacity? The same illogical notion propels Bladerunner 2049. And yes, excellent flicks, despite my nitpicks.)

Oh, sure, the fundamental need in a story is to have dire problems for the protagonists to face and either overcome or dramatically fail. (I explain how that need drives most writers and directors into narrow and often repetitive paths.) 

== A fine new magazine ==

New from the Berggruen Institute and the World Post comes Noema Magazine. It will cover the overlapping realms of philosophy, geopolitics, economics and technology. From artificial intelligence and the climate crisis to the future of democracy and capitalism, we seek a deeper understanding of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century.

In ancient Greek, the word noēma means “thinking” or the “object of thought.” "In this era of social transformations, many of which are accelerated by COVID-19, there is a dire need for new ideas and paradigms to frame the world we are moving into."

Meanwhile... Wil McCarthy – one of the most innovative SF writers of the 1990s, whose super-tech speculations were so plausible they led to patents - is back with two incredible novels. First, THE COLLAPSIUM takes off from Wil’s epic Queendom of Sol society, where programmable matter and miniature black holes drive the ultimate Utopia - with the ultimate dark side. “If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then any sufficiently advanced society should come to resemble a fairy tale.”

Follow this with ANTEDILUVIAN:  Before disaster erased the coastlines of the Antediluvian age, men and women struggled and innovated in a world of savage contrasts. It was a time when archetypes and myths were written upon the fabric of humanity, that are still preserved in our oldest stories.  In a brilliant and dangerous brain-hacking experiment, Harv Leonel and Tara Mukherjee are about to discover entire lifetimes of human memory coded in our genes, and reveal ancient legends that are very real - and very deadly. Follow all that next year with RICH MAN'S SKY: “When billionaires control the space program, where does that leave the rest of us?”

== A wonderful universe, despite nits to pick ==

This NPR article offers some sci fi media notes, starting with “Troop Zero,” which - while a bit clichéd - was charming with unexpected SETI/scifi angles. But moving on to the Big Leagues… what could be more exciting and hopeful a sign, than Michael Chabon being put in charge of the new  CBS All-Access Star Trek series “Picard”?  A total pro and visionary, who never let success go to his head and who never disowned science fiction.

Plumbing deeper into the series, here’s an interesting rumination on “Picard,” carrying Patrick Stewart’s iconic captain into a future when the Romulan Empire has been shattered by the supernova that divided two universes, the “ortho” Trek cosmos and that of JJ Abrams (as usual, vivid but illogical). I don’t have CBS-AA and can wait a bit. But I think the prospects for this show sound very good. And I do care about that, a lot! Star Trek is the most logically consistent and well-maintained of all science fiction cosmologies and the one that keeps urging us to be better than we are. That contrasts sharply vs. the epically dumb and generally immoral competitor I denounce in Star Wars on Trial.

Alas there is one deeply flawed aspect of the Trek universe - a truly nerdy but vexing complaint - and that is the distribution of intelligent species. If the Klingon and Romulan and Cardassian empires were all large enough to be a threat to the Federation then they were of comparable - if somewhat lesser - size. Then should they not have contained comparable numbers of star systems with intelligent races? And in the Shatnerverse wasn’t it alluded to that none of those empires were kind to those “natives”? Consider the depiction of a Federation filled with noisy, rollicking and sometimes bickering free peoples. What about the peoples who were suppressed by neighboring empires before the Klingons had their Chernobyl and the Romulans their supernova?

This has been a major blind spot in the Trek universe.  That we would see a sense of mission to the Federation’s righteous struggles against the three empires. (This is hinted at in the laudable fan-flick “Prelude to Axanar.”)

We saw this a bit in the Federation liberating Bajor in DS9 and in the Gamma Quadrant War.  It should have been a major plot element of the Klingon Chernobyl plot line and even bigger in the Romulan Supernova calamity, in Picard.

== And finally... ==

A fascinating – almost sci-fi-ish – tale about some nerdy young women in WWII who played war games that revealed U-boat tactics and helped to win the Battle of the Atlantic.  

SETI Law expert Michael Michaud’s Michael Michaud’s first novel, Eastern Wind, describes the discovery of an unexpected shipwreck off Catalina Island that changes Chinese and North American history. His second science-related novel, entitled Monsters, suggests the potentially threatening implications of genetic manipulation, and how the concentration of great wealth in a small elite could lead to irresponsible use of that technology.

Jean-Marc Ligny reports that “The French Army (and other sober agencies) is recruiting SF writers.” 

Need cheering up? Sample some chapters of my new sci fi comedy novel “The Ancient Ones.”  Enjoy free sample chapters! Stay capable of smiling... and... 

Keep looking upward...

There's a lot more than symbolism. But okay, let's talk symbolism.

Having marched in the 60s (and my Bernie-clone journalist-father sided early with MLK) and having mourned both King & Bobby, I know tense times can push radicalization that ranges from overdue ferocity (#MeToo and BLM and toppling confed statues) all the way to over-wrought and unhelpful shrieks, or even enemy agitprop. Time tells the difference, of course, and often I've needed to change where I drew those lines, for example when I revised my opinion of Malcolm X. (Let's have some fun and put him on Lee's pedestal!) 

Alas, I will get dissed for even raising the fact that this spectrum -- ranging from long-overdue fury and fed-up activism to unhelpful radical preening*, to falling for KGB/KKK agitprop lures -- even exists. Those applying purity tests (that they conveniently get to rule-upon) won't accept me as an ally, however hard or long or effectively I have fought for the Great Experiment. (Far more effectively than most of those radical judges.) 

Still, I'd rank Cortez and Pizarro and Jackson and Sheridan higher, as murderous white oppressors of indigenous peoples, than the Italian explorer Columbus, who arguably did little more than slightly accelerate an an inevitable contact that others botched into holocaust.

As for Churchill, whose statue is now under attack? Was he a man of his times who said things cringeworthy by later standards? Absolutely. Though Gandhi also freely admitted that his guilt-tripping tactics could only sway the public conscience of a British public that HAD a conscience, and that most empires - especially those of Hitler or Stalin - would simply have rubbed him out, with a shrug.

Only fools ignore how crucial Churchill was - for all his faults - at unifying resistance to those vastly more-evil empires. Can you truly claim to be anti-nazi while howling at the one person who most-consistently and effectively thwarted Hitler's mad dreams?

Elsewhere I quote Fredrick Douglass's eulogy of Abraham Lincoln (look it up!) where he avows that he spent years frustrated with Lincoln's seemingly tepid abolitionism... till he realized that there could have been no ally better suited and positioned to steer a path through perilous times and bring the needed change.

When judging historical figures, one test stands above all others. Did he or she strive to move the needle forward? Were they substantially better than those they led and better than their times? By that standard, Jefferson and Washington led, even in the cautionary tale of their self-admitted hypocrisies, but especially in setting momentum to a ponderously too-slow but inexorable arc of history and justice that, for all its frustrating faults, shines brightly against all the rest of the last 10,000 wretched years. A momentum that today's activists replicate, reinforce and re-invigorate.

Gene Roddenberry put women crew in miniskirts and made Uhura a receptionist, and we had to wait a long time for Sisko. So was GR a sexist-racist pig? Or was he the fellow who lifted our gaze from a morass of sci fi dystopias to imagine a better future of justice and peace, when all of these issues will be viewed in retrospect as the weird reflexes of frightened caveman ancestors? See what MLK said about Star Trek, before you blurt a reflex answer.

We're now in the fight of our lifetimes to preserve that Experiment. To prove that government of, for and by the people shall not perish from the Earth. Some would split our coalition with obsessive symbolism attacks aimed not at redressing injustice, but preening a high virtue-classification for themselves, while offending the very public whose support we need, right now. 

I draw that line between confederate statues (boo!) and taking Jackson off the $20 bill and painting BLM on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of Trump's stolen house (choice!), on the one hand - and Churchill and Washington on the other. 

But I HAVE BEEN WRONG BEFORE. I'll even listen.

Will you? 

== Beware of allies who would weaken us ==

* Again this is about splitterism. Shall we seek a broad Union Coalition to win this Phase Eight of the American Civil War? Or take pleasure in offending the very allies that we need?

Because if we don't win it crushingly at the ballot box in November, we may be forced into a much worse Phase Nine. Take a hint from the recent "Generals' Revolt." We need allies now, more than ever.

I arm you here with all you need, in order to quash those splitter mantras. Get to know these facts, so you can show the splitters they are factually wrong, in almost every respect! And yes, there's much more in Polemical Judo.

== It's the cop unions, stupid ==

I predicted in The Transparent Society (1997) that cop-cams and bystander video recordings would hold police accountable… though perhaps in grudging increments. Even earlier, in my novel Earth (1991) I talked about how there would be *fewer* police in a future when all citizens can record whatever they see with their eyes… when most kinds of violent street crime largely vanish because it is always caught. (The Seattle experiment could preview this result… at least during its zealous “co-op” phase.)

That - of course - is how to “defund the police”… by reducing our need for them, plus ensuring that only grownups get on the force, because cameras catch imbeciles like these Chicago fools lunging in a congressman’s office while their city was being looted.

Cop unions around the country must decide - right now - whether they are here to protect the assholes, or to protect good cops from the assholes. There is no longer any middle ground, and the "good majority" needs to say so.

== Late notes ==

Vote Veterans pushes candidates for office who have served. Yes, most are Democrats. That’s a trend based on a lot of things, including the devolution of the Republican Party into fact-hating virulence and madness. So these folks are stepping up to defend America again.  Oh, I wouldn’t mind a bit if Joe chose Tammy Duckworth. Look her up.

Six former confederate states plus (you’d guess) Indiana use age as an excuse to limit use of absentee ballots, violating (as asserted by Equal Citizen) the 26th Amendment.

Finally... Borowitz is a national treasure!

Peering into the cosmos

Let's take a break to look upward. First a quick roundup of some interesting links:

- Fast Radio Bursts release ginormous amounts of energy in fractions of a second, detectable across the cosmos.  One occurring in our own galaxy let astronomers tie it to a fast-spinning magnetic pulsar of magnetar. Fantastic.

- Elsewhere I describe how the second confirmed interstellar visitor comet 21/Borisov is emitting far more carbon monoxide than most of our local comets. This could be because Borisov’s home system had a different composition. More likely, it formed in that system’s outermost regions, helping explain also why it got torn loose to drift into our own system.

- Nineteen asteroids, known as the Centaurs, were first spotted just a few years ago with “strange” orbits, largely retrograde. Anyone with good orbital mechanics instincts would guess one possible explanation – the one I offered in Existence – that some or all of these might be past interstellar visitors that got whipped around by close-passing Jupiter, which robbed much of their momentum and sent them into solar orbit.

- A stunning-gorgeous depiction of the newly discovered binary of super-duper black holes where the smaller one crosses the bigger ones’s accretion disk with flashes bright as a trillion suns.

- The latest “zoom out into the cosmos” perspective fly-through is pretty darned amazing.

- Researchers believe "quasar tsunamis” could explain a cosmological conundrum: why there are so few truly enormous galaxies in the universe.  A quasar tsunami, heats interstellar material to billions of degrees, flinging it into interstellar space. Once a galaxy reaches a certain size, the theory goes, its central black hole goes postal in a quasar tsunami — “and the rest, as they say, is history.”

- Researchers looked at a black hole that "feeds" off a nearby star, pulling material onto a flat accretion disk. By looking closely at the X-ray light coming from the disk a team found imprints indicating that some light had been bent back toward the disk and reflected off, confirming Einstein's general theory of relativity in a new way.

- NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made an unexpected discovery last year, spotting a black hole emitting a massive cloud of X-rays some 30,000 light years away.

== And more spaaaaace! ==

- Through NASA JPL, NIAC Fellow Jonathan Sauder has launched a public challenge to help develop an obstacle avoidance sensor for a possible future Venus rover, using no heat sensitive electronics. See: NASA Tournament Lab, Mechanical Obstacle Avoidance Detector - Exploring Hell: Avoiding Obstacles on a Clockwork Rover.

- A terrific article compares concepts for “relativistic interstellar flight” (obeying Einstein’s speed limit) on the 60^th anniversary of Robert Bussard’s fantastically persuasive Interstellar Ramjet idea, that seems to find a way out of the trap of the Relativistic Rocket Equation, by sucking in its fuel as it goes. SF author Larry Niven exploited this notion with wonderful results, in novels of the 1980s. Though Poul Anderson’s earlier epic TAU ZERO won all the awards as a true classic of space fiction.

- BRUIE, a buoyant rover with two independent wheels, is designed to drive along the underside of ice crust covering ocean worlds like Europa, Enceledus and even possibly Titan. 

- With fascinating implications, researchers saw that galactic clusters with the same properties, with similar temperatures, appeared to be less bright in one direction of the sky, and brighter than expected in another direction, suggesting that the universe is anisotropic. The weird observations may have something to do with dark energy. The anisotropy can’t go all the way back… we’d see that in the images of the earliest eras in the microwave sky background.

== Shouting (nearly alone) that U.S. should avoid a loony lunar trap ==

- “NASA watchdog says Trump’s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion.” Would this fritter away all chance America might (in partnership with Japan and Europe) pioneer where all the real wealth is, out there, asteroids and maybe Phobos? Sure. There is no argument for a US manned lunar "footprint" mission that stands up under scrutiny and the light of facts. That's is 100%. But for this administration all of that is not a "bug." It is a feature.

Dig it again and again. HUMANITY is going back to the Moon! China, India, Russia... all are desperate to go, for their rites of adulthood. Their bar Moonszvahs, like we did 50 years ago. Fine. Mazel tov! Hope you find stuff to prove me wrong about that barren plain, where there's a little polar ice and absolutely nothing else of value. Except tourism.

We should be doing what others can't! Going where trillions in wealth and opportunities await. 

Oh, sure, we can do some lunar stuff to keep a hand in. The Gateway and letting Musk & Bezos rent landers and hotel rooms in lunar orbit to all those tourists.


== And finally... ==

- From Cornell University research: "We report the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a low-mass star called Kepler-1649. The planet, Kepler-1649 c, is 1.06+0.15−0.10 times the size of Earth and transits its 0.1977 +/- 0.0051 Msun mid M-dwarf host star every 19.5 days. It receives 74 +/- 3 % the incident flux of Earth, giving it an equilibrium temperature of 234 +/- 20K and placing it firmly inside the circumstellar habitable zone. Kepler-1649 also hosts a previously-known inner planet that orbits every 8.7 days and is roughly equivalent to Venus in size and incident flux. Kepler-1649 c was originally classified as a false positive by the Kepler pipeline, but was rescued as part of a systematic visual inspection of all automatically dispositioned Kepler false positives. This discovery highlights the value of human inspection of planet candidates even as automated techniques improve, and hints that terrestrial planets around mid to late M-dwarfs may be more common than those around more massive stars."

Is it cool to be a member of a civilization that does this sort of stuff? You'll have to fight to keep it.

Musing about Coronavirus outcomes... and the Roberts Court... and the 'fundamental' lie underlying Wall Street

Pausing amid our serious choice between BLM and MAGA, let's not gorget the crisis that was already underway. Let me start by linking to some of the many podcasts and interviews I've done, across the last few weeks.

First, hosted by Dr. David Bray of the Atlantic Council: "A conversation with internationally recognized author and scientist Dr. David Brin, noted public policy professor and expert Dr. Kathryn Newcomer on the technologies, investments, and policy actions that could help us rebuild from COVID-19 on a global scale."

And one more podcast! In this one, Amanda Caniglia of The Bella Vista Social Club & Caffe joins Steve Chapel of Intellectual Capital, Alexis Dixon of Mediation Solutions International, to chat and interview me about these strange times and stranger yet to come. And yeah, I wish I had a deeper, better voice. So I try to add extra content value… plus a song. 

And Gadi Evron’s Essence of Wonder Podcast dives into the nominees for the Best Professional Artist Hugo... then interviews me about the role of science fiction in modern life. The connection between the visual and descriptive language. And other fine, diverting topics.

But I'm not the only wiseguy blathering or else trying to help change things. Fore example...

... yipe! Some of the wakened Republicans on the Lincoln Project are pulling no punches in their one-minute “Mourning in America” ad. And look up what George F. Will has been saying about the undead mutant horror that's become of his beloved Republican Party.

Meanwhile says Scott Foster, expert on Asian economics: “Stupid people have been called what's going on in the States a WWII Moment. But a real WWII economic policy with real WWII discipline may be required to get us out of this self-generated disaster. Asian manufacturing is coming back on line. While many U.S. factories are closing for good.” 

== The Roberts Court: commanded by their masters to end their own relevance ==

I used to think that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts cared most about the institution of the Court. That is what he talks about most. But I’m now convinced that’s a cover-scam. Roberts knows that his current trajectory - relentlessly abetting every cheat that shatters 250 years of constitutionally democratic precedent - will eventually lead to the people rising up to bypass an ‘institution’ that's now more corrupt than it was under John Taney. He is as suborned - and likely blackmailed - as anyone in DC.

On Contrary Brin blog, we’ve been discussing what happens if - faced with just such a popular rising and imminent electoral collapse - the GOP is ordered by its masters to prevent any election happening at all, in November. Or else to wage war on the perceived legitimacy of that election. The following is cogent from that discussion:

“A violation of the Constitution as clear as halting the election for anything short of holocaust-apocalypse level emergency would need all three branches' support to sustain, plus broad popular acceptance -- which won't happen. And the states, not the Feds, have authority and mechanism to actually run elections. So what happens if Lord Farquaad declares an election cancellation, SCOTUS agrees, and states vote anyway? Remember, the House is the ultimate arbiter on the validity of both its own members and on the election of the President; the Senate is the ultimate arbiter on the validity of its own members and on the election of Vice President.” In short, it is entirely possible (by design!) to elect a Congress and a new President even in the face of Federal executive and judiciary opposition. And if necessary, that's what will happen.”

That paragraph invites contemplation of enough potentially weird outcomes that exceed even those I speculated in the “Exit Strategies" chapter of Polemical Judo. For example, a Biden-Trump presidency? No, won’t happen, because the House votes for president with one vote per state, favoring redders, despite whatever the vast majority of the people want. No, if it comes to that, it will be civil war, after all... exactly as Putin and Murdoch want.

I would add that there is precedent for proceeding with a new Congress even if many states did not choose to participate in the election. To be clear- almost none of the representatives or Senators elected from seceding states in 1860 showed up for Congress in early 1861. None after elections in 1862 and 1864, and hence the quorum in the Capitol was based upon those still participating. Hence, if Trump were to "defer" the November 2020 election - or declare a boycott that neo-confederate states participated in - the rest of the states could hold their elections as usual, then have their electors vote and send their Representatives to the new Congress. 

The precedent for those states who withdrew is clear. They are ignored.

== Wisdom from a science fictional seer ==

My colleague and bro Kim Stanley Robinson has a major article - The Coronavirus is Re-writing our Imaginations - in The New Yorker. (That alone is a victory for modernity, since that zine used to issue lynching-jeremiads against science fiction, with insipid regularity.) Robinson’s thought-provoking piece takes a mile-high perspective on our ructious time. 

“It’s very likely that there will be more water shortages. And food shortages, electricity outages, devastating storms, droughts, floods. These are easy calls. They’re baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.

“Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave. (The novel I’ve just finished begins with this scenario, so it scares me most of all.) Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

“Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.”

Like me, Robinson is fascinated by horizons of perception… what thresholds of future possibility people are willing to ponder and act upon. In novels and public statements he has long fretted that our neighbors are used to fobbing off on future generations potentially lethal environmental problems… a concern I shared via Earth and Existence. (See my elucidation of “Horizon Theory".)

In fact he sees hope in our current, self-interested interest in flattening-the-curve. 

“We’re now confronting a miniature version of the tragedy of the time horizon. We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in the future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise. In this case, the time horizon is so short that we are the future people. It’s harder to come to grips with the fact that we’re living in a long-term crisis that will not end in our lifetimes. But it’s meaningful to notice that, all together, we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon. Amid the tragedy and death, this is one source of pleasure. Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to.”

Hey, guarded optimism is my own schtick, as well, bro. Any other civilization would have crushed gadflies like thee and me… and most of our readers, too. And the scientists and front line workers and fact professions who will likely — in just the nick of time - save us all. So we’re already ahead of the game, just by continuing to play, and having hope.

== The Biggest Lie of Wall Street Parasites ==

Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service offers an excellent missive on energy flows in nature!  It is vital to understand we’re still part of an ecosystem that relies upon thermodynamics, even in economics. If fact, I’d like to add a couple of points about economics mythologies.

1) We are learning a hard lesson: that one of the wretched mistakes of the MBA caste has been to over-emphasize “efficiency” at all costs. Just-in-time systems developed by Toyota in the 1970s and 80s - based partly on teachings of industrial guru W. Edwards Demming - had terrific effects on pushing the envelope of quality on assembly lines. But when it exaggerated into a cult aversion to ever stockpiling parts on-site, industrial Japan grew fragile and then collapsed when they took a hit, as in the Fukushima debacle. Picture a marathoner with 0% body fat abruptly dropped into the desert for a multi-week survival trek.

In nature, the animals who are ‘efficient’ in a niche keep winning and winning… till hard times hit and suddenly each genus loses most of the specialist species that had branched-off. A lesson is to give Resilience equal priority to Efficiency. 

I’ve been urging twenty different measures to make society more robust vs. future shocks. (I’m interviewed here by Peter Denning for the ACM on what simple measures - technological and social - might help accomplish this.)

2) Ask Wall Streeters to justify the spectacular costs of their activities — fully aware that 99.99% of it does not generate investment capital for companies innovating improved goods and services. They will recite their magical catechism-incantation — that they help to “discover the true price of equities and companies and capital.” 

This rationalization is issued not as the mumbo-jumbo that it is, but as an axiom of faith, based upon the one time that's a service, when companies do raise fresh capital via IPO or other original equity sales. But the rest of the time, by nibbling at the edges of every transaction, Streeters claim they help to “smooth” the slope of value. It sounds plausible, till you realize —

— that it is stunning malarkey-juju, based on absolutely nothing whatsoever. Certainly no analogues in nature, where health is defined by how FEW steps there are along the steep energy slopes that lead from sunlight to photosynthesizing plants, from plants to herbivores, from herbivores to carnivores, to poop and carrion that feed scavengers and microbes. Five big steps? Six or seven? In that case, everyone is pretty healthy and each layer is doing pretty well, supping in turn along the downward flowing river of free energy from the sun.

So what happens in nature when there are many, many increments, nibbling along the edges and “smoothing the slope”? 
It’s called parasitism. 
The plants are sickly from fungus. 
Herbivores are bleary-eyed and scrawny from tapeworm and the scraggly-mangy lions are desperate. 
Parasites are gobbling the energy increments, leaving barely enough for the main participants to stagger on.

Does that sound like today’s corporations, small companies and entrepreneurs? Bled at every phase by commissions and arbitrage fees and consultants and insider trades and vast vampire-siphonings by a CEO caste that is no longer recruited from the innovators or shop-floor engineers (as they are still, in China), but installed by fellow board members, all part of an incestuous cabal of 5000 golf buddies.

Nothing could be more anti-competitive and more… soviet. Or more like the parasitism that brings both economies and ecologies to the very brink.

== Whimsey… thoughpossible to ponder… ==

This DIY Guillotine has… chops. Though Ikea left out the support braces, ropes, latches and pulleys!

Can we “fix” social media without ruining them? One (of many) Practical Suggestions.

Twitter’s decision to slap warning labels on some Trumpian tweets – those seeming to incite violence - “was the culmination of months of debate inside the company over developing protocols to limit the impact of objectionable messages from world leaders — and what to do when Mr. Trump inevitably broke it.”

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday told employees he was standing firm in the company’s decision not to moderate a post in which President Trump said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” And with less than half a year to the U.S. election, that means the trolls - especially in those Kremlin basements - are looking at a welcome mat.

I am about to offer one small proposal - a potential partial solution - from among many that have never been tried. But first... perspective time.

The problem of toxicity in media is not a new one. Every new medium of communication was applied to nefarious ends, before it eventually lived up to its elevating promise. The printing press was first used to spread horrible hate tracts exacerbating Europe’s religious wars. Only across subsequent centuries did the spread of books truly uplift an increasingly literate population. 

Similar bad-beginnings were seen with the arrival of newspapers and newsreels. In the 1930s, loudspeakers and radio amplified gifted orators with godlike voices, sparking humanity’s worst era. It always starts by empowering predators. But over time, citizens became better at culling wheat from chaff from poison in each technology, and we all grew better for it.

Today (as some of us predicted in the 1980s) a similar transition is happening in digital media at 100x the speed and 10,000x the sheer volume of crap and lying misuse, leaving us with very little time to make the same transition. Meanwhile, evil or fanatical or insane manipulators twist the very concept of “fact” or “truth” out of all recognition. 

We need tools of maturity and we need them fast.

There are two general ways to achieve this. The first -- used in almost every society before ours -- was to set up a caste of censors, gatekeepers, priests or regulators of what the masses may see or know. Our entire Enlightenment Experiment has been a rejection of that approach, which stifled and brought nothing but calamitous error across history. All our values rail against it – e.g. in every Hollywood film. Indeed, so strong is this Suspicion of Authority (SoA) reflex -- especially in Americans -- that our enemies are using it against us, by attacking even the very idea of professional expertise.

The other approach is lateral criticism. Argument (ideally based at least somewhat on facts) can apply reciprocal accountability via markets, democracy and now the innovation of the web. It can work! We and all our vast array of modern miracles are proof. But the whole thing breaks down when we huddle in separated ghettoes of ignorance, reciting incantations and nostrums that are fed to us by evil men.

== Can we innovate ways to save innovative media? ==

In early 2017, I was invited to Facebook HQ, where executives and designers were wringing their hands. They fretted over how thoroughly their platform had been hijacked and abused -- much of it by hostile foreign powers – with clear intent to warp American democracy. And yes, for a brief time, folks at Facebook seemed serious about trying to find solutions, hoping to achieve a three-way win-win, starting (of course) with their top priority:

1 - Protect user growth and profitability.

But ideally these solutions would also...

2 - Maximize user freedom of self-expression.

3 - Reduce the amount and impact of deliberate or inadvertent campaigns of falsehood or incitement.

During my hour-long meeting with executives, I offered possible ways to achieve this trifecta. But I might as well have saved my breath. As the Trump Era became a new (if bizarre) normal, goal number three simply floated away.

So we now approach another U.S. Election. And seeing all their efforts to wreck the Western Enlightenment teetering in the balance, our enemies will redouble efforts to spread tsunamis of lies via social media. Moreover, while Facebook will remain obdurate until the end, Twitter and other platforms are beginning to take this seriously.

So, it is for them that I’ll trot out one – just one – of the proposals I offered Facebook on that futile day.

== The simplest method ==

Envision a pair of small symbols added next to the Thumbs-Up indicator, as in the example below.  Say an exclamation point and a question mark. Generally innocuous, these clickables allow the user to seek more information… or alternative points of view. Note in figure 1 below how they have minimal footprint on the user’s precious screen space.  

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In Figure #1 (above) we see the two symbols are empty and easily ignored.  

Only now I lean on insights from Edward Tufte’s classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Because there are many dimensions of useful information that can be conveyed via a mere exclamation point!

In Figure 2 (below) we see how the exclamation point can convey several spectra of information, perhaps throbbing when the host company has detected a suspicious source or bad actors at work. Fullness – as in a thermometer – can show the host’s level of certainty that there’s a problem, while color or texture can bear upon the type of problem.

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Users do not have to memorize any of the meanings! But they’ll learn, over time, that a tiny, flashing red exclamation point means there’s another side to whatever meme they are relishing. Moreover it’s hard to accuse the host company of partisan bias when the same thing happens to every side.

Is an offer of rebuttal enough to cancel toxic memes? Well, it can’t hurt to lure a few of the curious to sample refutations. And that tiny nonpartisan nag could be enough to crack the wall of a Nuremberg rally.

The second kind of clickable Alert-o-meter – a Question Mark - links to sites that are less adversarial and more informative than linked by the exclamation point. Here user preferences play a role. The follow-up path may be encyclopedic or lighter or even entertaining. The aim is to encourage curiosity and depth to the topic.  

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Again, the User is free to ignore the small alert-o-meter symbol. (An hence the host site doesn't drive away angry customers.) Still, it lurks there, serving as a reminder that there’s more to this!

Not only does this help at least a little to re-establish the notion of argument and verifiability … that some sources are more verified and trustworthy than others… but we are entering an era when society may decide to modify the blanket protections enjoyed by social media companies, from all responsibility for malicious content. Ohnly a fool would ignore that possibility. An approach like this one might be just enough to protect the site host from liability for helping to spread lies with dire consequences.

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And there you have it. Just one of a dozen ideas I offered mavens at Facebook in their panic after the 2016 elections … before they realized that the winners of that stolen contest actually wanted no meaningful changes at all, and their best (commercial) interest lay in leaving things alone.

Think about that. And realize -- nothing is likely to happen via self-regulation, or reform, or tweaks like mine, no matter how logical and helpful. Of course they have all sold-out and I am wasting my time.

We all know this dire moment will be resolved massively, in one direction or another. And when it is, a mere couple of innocuously flashing symbols just won’t do.