Some of you I am sure read economist Paul Krugman. And you may have already seen this. But if not, this is, as they say, right in your wheelhouse. Highly recommended too for anyone interested in where this world may be heading…it’s a straight transcript of a conversation so the English can get a bit funny at times, but you will get the drift for sure.
1 Like
Teaser quote, " So it really is a world in which people take these sometimes fun, sometimes weird or problematic science fiction ideas from the 1990s and they try to deliver on them. And the other anecdote that Abe and I have in our book Underground Empire about this is that if you read Peter Thiel he says that the whole idea behind PayPal was inspired by another Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon, which is all about the collapse of the U.S. dollar and cryptography. Plus this convenient hoard of U.S. gold allows for private individuals to take over. And so Thiel says in a couple of places, he says this was the idea behind PayPal. This was what was inspiring us. We wanted to be the replacement for the U.S. dollar, even if we didn’t understand jack shit about how it is that international monetary finance actually worked. And so science fiction becomes I guess the unacknowledged legislator of mankind.
Krugman: Good God. We should rewrite the end of Keynes, whose General Theory ends with saying that ideas of economists and political philosophers rule the world. But you’re saying it’s actually science fiction writers?
Farrell: Yes. Science fiction writers are the defunct scribblers who are actually shaping the world around us."
Nice catch, @johncoate , thank you very much! How are you these days anyway?
(heads up: moving this thread to the Scifi Economics category).
I’m fine. Doing what I can to cope with what is going on over here.
My health is good right now as far as I know. I have been working on getting my house on the north coast in good enough shape to try to sell even though the interest rates are high and incomes are not keeping pace below the top levels. So it is a fairly lousy time to sell. But we need to concentrate our resources in an area with good quality health care. That does not exist in rural America.
Politically and culturally the USA is in an existential crisis easily equal to, if not greater, than what went down in the late 60s. Yet, in a real sense, the argument is the same. But Trump and his ilk have made it hip and fashionable in large areas of the American populace to channel the worst version of yourself.
I was born less than six years after the end of WWII. My father was an unarmed medic in the US Army who was captured by the Nazis and nevertheless condemned to die by execution, which he survived because the German soldier was a lousy shot. I grew up seeing the wound on his arm knowing who the Nazis were, and are. And I knew if that shot was a few inches to the right, I don’t even exist.
I was one of these kids who would go around the neighborhood raising money in small change for UNICEF. Those images of all the world’s children holding hands together in a world that embraces our differences as well as our similarities? I believed that fervently starting at about age five. And so did pretty much every one of my contemporary friends.
We always had the fringy right wingers around who would come up with new versions of white people hating on everyone else. And sometimes they would win. But what is going on now feels like some crazy reversal of the outcome of the US Civil War.
But I stay hopeful because I know that most Americans do not want this. And maybe a lot more of them will get off their butts and show up to vote, which they did not do last year. When that happens the GOP/MAGA won’t be able to rig things enough to ensure that they win. When it’s close, they always have Supreme Court to put their thumbs on the scales for them.
Anyway, naturally this all preoccupies me and everyone I know. So I am glad to have a beautiful place in coastal California and I am sad I have to give it up. But I need to make it earn out. When it does my wife Hilarie can finally retire.
Otherwise, we live in a suburban neighborhood that honestly reminds me of a TV show set. Having a somewhat Buddhist outlook on the impermanence of form is helpful. It’s a safe place to ride a bicycle and there are good hikes in the hills nearby. But dullsville. Mainly though all of our kids and grandkids, with just a couple of exceptions, live around here. Much focus on the family for me.
I wrote a short intro piece to a new book about online community management that is coming out in Germany in a few weeks. It is by a woman well known in German-speaking online community management circles, Tanja Laub, who I met in 2019 when I stopped over in the Netherlands before coming to Brussels. I was visiting another online community professional, Kirsten Wagenaar, who I met and befriended at the same 2013 VIrcom where I met you.
Right now I am up along a mountain river in a cabin my parents bought in the 60s. But this is modern California so it was rebuilt after a fire. (The California dream of today comes with a lot of fire danger and huge insurance costs if you can even get it.)
It’s a family reunion birthday party for my brother who just turned 76. The weather here in California is unseasonably cool while so much of the rest of the world is cooking. It’s because the jet stream is stuck in a weird pattern that seems to be occurring more frequently as the arctic warms. Meanwhile of course the US Government, or what is left of it, is now an official climate change denier. I tell ya gang, it is surreal. These people are dangerously crazy.
This coming weekend in Oakland, California is the 40th anniversary party for The WELL. It is a fairly small system now, owned by a consortium of long time WELL users. Many of the WELL members have known each other now for more than 30 years, some as long as the full 40. Many of those people do not have children and some have no real family at all. What they do have is each other. I think for a lot of them, The WELL is more important now than it ever was. It has become a remarkable support group.
I miss you guys. I had such a great time with ER in that 2016-2021 period. I hope to be more free to travel as soon as I get my house sold.
That said, I am going to New York in September with my daughter and my 12 year old granddaughter for a week. My daughter works for a high-end climate change org that puts on a big annual event in NYC. So I’m grandpa showing the kid the Big Apple.
1 Like