entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

The so-called horror genre is wasted on me; Halloween is not spooky, slasher films are jejune and boring, and eldritch creatures from another dimension are about as scary as a nerd dressed up as a dwarf holding a plastic axe.  I suspect that it has to do with my complete inability to lend any credence to anything supernatural; gods, auras, chakras, astrology... it's all the same.

Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" is a character-driven anthropological story about the one true source of horror: people and their astounding capacity for denial and delusion.  And like a good horror book, it had the hair on my neck on end, made me make my "oh shit" face often, sometimes screaming "OH!  OOOHHHHH!" like Sam Kinison, and occasionally clutching my head and moaning softly.

Imagine, if you will, a system for rating food where the food is delivered by enormous corporations to the rating companies, who depend on the goodwill and money from the corporations to live, and who are staffed by people who weren't talented enough to work for the corporations.  The corporations then package the food in a way that the good food is on top and the bad food is on the bottom, which proves to be a popular way to sell food; but because it's a good way to make money, they decide to repackage the bad food in the same way and pass it off as a regular good-bad food package.  The ratings companies sign off on this, because it's bad for business to say, "Hey, that food is bad," and that assumes that they could even tell that it's bad in the first place.  Then the corporations start making packages of packages, so it's impossible to tell which of them has the bad food, and where it is, and in the meantime, banks are telling farmers to grow more bad food.  And all this time, nobody stops to think that, hey, if people keep eating bad food, they're going to eventually get pretty fucking sick.  That is a pretty decent analogy, if i do say so myself, for the 2007-8 financial crisis: massive food poisoning featuring projectile vomiting and liquishits.

Lewis definitely has his bias as someone whose first-hand experience as a Wall Street cog left him bewildered and feeling slightly dirty, but the stories told within the book are chillingly plausible, and the whole world is still struggling through the wreckage left behind.  The book puts the lie to the idea that a market free of regulation will regulate itself; centers of power, unchecked, will continue to accumulate power.  It would have been nice, of course, if the SEC had bothered to so much as glance in the direction of the CDO clusterfuck, because that's their fucking job.  But the true problem came about when the greed that fuels Wall Street was funnelled through the magical thinking of "real estate never drops" translated into "this scheme has no risk and never will," and nobody in the money-making machine ever checked their assumptions.  That's not science; it's bad business.

Transhumanism, when it is an actual "intellectual and cultural movement" instead of just a decent plot hook for a novel, is a ridiculous dodge.  My objections, though, are not because of the morality of what we might do, which seems to be the bone of contention in the all of the criticisms listed in Wikipedia; i think that's all a bunch of handwringing nonsense.  Instead, the real problem with transhumanism is that it turns away from the problems that we have now by thinking about how we can solve them in the future.  We should be thinking about how to solve these problems now.  How can one think about moving beyond one's humanity when we don't yet know how to effectively be human?

To call yourself a transhumanist is to reveal yourself as the worst sort of elitist asshole, because you're trying to solve your personal inconveniences with technology that doesn't exist.  There are people all over the world dying because they have no clean water; societies still haven't figured out how to have representative leadership that scales as populations increase and that discourages leaders from making a career out of pulling strings; there's (a possibly imagined renaissance of) fundamentalist fuckheads around the world who are trying to stamp out critical thinking; and much more, at the root of all of which lies this: we don't know how to teach our kids how to learn and what to learn in order to make tomorrow better.  So when you talk to me about the Singularity, i'll probably just tell you to fuck off, because there's no way we'll generate artificial intelligence worth a damn when we barely have a clue what natural intelligence is or how it works (and i'm talking wetware here).  Stop wanking to your fantasy of a nanotech-enhanced brain, and spend that energy figuring out how to get along with your neighbor.

Paulo Coelho, writer of The Alchemist, wrote this article for Ecuador's El Universo.  I've translated it without permission because it's an interesting read, but mainly because i need the exercise, so please forgive any solecisms and transliterations.

( predictions of the future! predictions bound to come true! watch and listen, for you now know... the future! )

Hit Song Science can determine the likelihood of a song becoming a hit (registration: klortho/klortho). I can't decide whether this is ultra-cool and will lead to major labels dropping crap like a stone and looking for quality stuff amongst the unsigned and indie... or whether it is abominable and will lead major labels to perform unspeakable surgery on their existing music in order to make it "mathematically viable".

I look forward to a time when science gives us genetically engineered intestinal flora that generate fresh oxygen as flatulence.