Mayfly One
But, why!? ~ The Darkenment ~ Deciduous teeth ~ What tech calls thinking ~ After virtue ~ Bitcoin's handbrake ~ The goose's common ~ Heroes & villains ~ Amusement arcade
Welcome to this newsletter called Mayfly.
The adult Mayfly lives for one day. It’s latin name is Ephemera vulgata. This newsletter is a memorial for all the common ephemera that piques my interest each week.
But, why!?
Why a newsletter? Podcasts take so much time to listen to, and I write better than I talk. Twitter’s too short, Instagram’s too filtered, Tiktok’s too looped, Facebook’s too dead, Clubhouse is too much like talk radio. In 2021, middle-aged man writes a blog is just so lame. It’s like taking up smoking in your 40s. If I call it a newsletter I can pretend it’s something else.
Why anything? I find and forget so much that fascinates. I want to keep the best bits in one place so I can rediscover them, and see what themes emerge. There’s also a lot to be said for practice, practice in writing and practice in thought. Maybe the discipline will help keep Alzheimer’s away? And honestly, what else am I going to do after the kids are in bed on a Monday evening during lockdown?
So here goes…
The Darkenment
I had a conversation with a friend about what he calls The Darkenment, which for him is the opposite of The Enlightenment. It is a retreat from reason, experiment, and debate, into the arms of reflex and dogma. He uses is to describe the culture wars.
I am sceptical of culture wars; and I’m suspicious of people who use words like woke or patriarchy, or phrases like cultural marxism or social justice warrior. They seem designed to get people so het up they don’t see what’s really happening. They end debate, just like calling someone a Karen does…use them and that’s it, there’s nothing more to say.
Even so, I was alarmed by Gina Carano’s recent blacklisting. As far as I can tell her point is that there is a comparison to be made between stirring up hate for people based on their politics and stirring up hate for people based on their religion / ethnicity. I don’t think a comparison of type necessarily implies a comparison of scale. A kitten and a lion are comparable in their felinity and their ferocity even if they are close in the former but divergent in the latter. And while Carano’s comparison is dumb - and may well hint that she has taboo beliefs - I cannot find it “abhorrent”, and I certainly do not think she should lose her livelihood over it or become a figure of hate.
The Darkenment will become a theme to explore further.
Deciduous teeth. Evolution WTF?
Isn’t this photo amazing?
It’s a child’s skull. Deciduous is what the professionals call milk teeth, as if they’re leaves (I just learnt its from the Latin for ‘to fall down’). Most mammals have the same system.
But how did this evolve? The idea is that the small teeth work when the jaw is small, but they’d be rubbish when the jaw has fully grown, so they fall out, and the big teeth which have been growing on the next rung fall into place.
But I ask:
Why don’t the teeth that are growing anyway just grow in place? That would seem ‘fitter’, and a more plausible outcome both genetically and developmentally, even from this starting point.
How can incremental fitness improvements acting on genetic drift or mutations in protein producing genes - even over millions of generations - have led to this outcome?
It requires as much of a leap of faith for me to explain this by natural selection as it would by creation or aliens or…
I was brought up on Dawkins Selfish Gene era evolutionary thinking, but there is so much more going on. And EvolutionWTF has just become another theme.
What tech calls thinking
I finished Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking, which has such a promising title but ends up disappointing a little with its lack of ambition. It does call out the privileges given to the platform over the content on the platform. That’s a familiar idea, which I’ll call Platform Pravileges, and explore more in later weeks.
But, for now, the most interesting element for me was Daub’s description of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and scapegoating and how this influences Peter Thiel. Girard’s idea is that we only desire what we see other people desire. As a result we will naturally compete for the same things. And when we don’t get what we want, we displace our anger on to a scapegoat. Daub says this appeals to Thiel (and Silicon Valley more broadly) because:
it means people are sheep (press like button, natch);
there’s a machinery underlying everything (prioritising platform over content);
the canon remains the canon, but it can be interpreted in a new way (claim to disrupt but just direct the cash in a different direction);
and displaced anger aimed at our tech overlords makes them feel like victims rather than parasites or oppressors, so they can sleep better at night.
Perhaps Mimetic Desire is worthy of further exploration?
After Virtue, or how do we know?
The same friend sent me a quotation by Alisdair Macintyre, who is a philosopher I do not know. I looked him up and thought again about whether the universe is neutral and what that means. My understanding, derived from Wikipedia, is that MacIntyre argues the enlightenment failed when it abandoned the Aristotelian concept of teleology. My admittedly-only-briefly-considered interpretation is that MacIntyre is so appalled by the moral relativism a neutral universe necessitates (because there is no right or wrong, fall or salvation), that he finds himself rushing into the arms of teleology to get away from it. I’m not so interested in Macintyre, but I am interested in this kind of backwards argument, retreating from a position not because of logic or evidence, but for reasons of personal preference.
Given the choice between the two, my personal preference, and what I sense to be true, continues to be a disinterested universe every time. Shit happens and I’m kind of ok with that. I’ve been very lucky so far, but I don’t ascribe that to my endeavour, will, or goodness, or to any kind of divine plan, and I can’t imagine any reason to. This will be a theme, but I don’t know what to call it yet. Disinterested Universe is the placeholder.
Another theme I will call Knowsys - systems for knowing, and the difference between what you know, and what you know. One is reasoned, verbal. One is visceral and inchoate. How should they be weighed in the final analysis?
Bitcoin’s handbrake, what am I mssing?
I do not understand the rise and rise of bitcoin. Bitcoin has an inbuilt handbrake that, as far as I can see, will stop it ever becoming a major currency that many people can transact with on a regular basis. That handbrake is the energy (and time) required by the proof of work necessary to add a block to the chain to register a transaction. Currently Bitcoin uses more energy than Argentina, and each transaction is tens of thousands of times more costly than a Visa transaction (although…). As Bitcoin gets bigger and is used more, and as it gets more valuable, that handbrake exerts a greater effect. That’s because the reward for doing the proof of work is Bitcoin, so the more Bitcoin is worth, the more machines will compete to win the competition to do the piece of work to earn the bitcoin, and therefore the more they’ll all have to spend in energy and processing power to win… The handbrake cannot be removed because it is integral to the distributed ledger / no single point of control design, and because it makes a 51% attack much harder.
Now I know some arguments about the flimsiness of fiat currency (not least from the Money As Debt film), and about store of value, and of course all that matters is what people believe matters, but I just don’t get how bitcoin can be mainstream with this handbrake always on. And that’s without worrying about all the digital wallets that get hacked and stolen and lost. And that’s even without worrying about how the cost of the energy used must eventually be transferred to the user - although of course our economies have always been terrible at properly pricing and apportioning that externality (Platform Pravileges).
But still, Ruffer and Musk are buying hundreds of millions of dollars of the stuff and its value has gone stratospheric. I must be missing something, and I’d be delighted if anyone can tell me what it is.
What’s the theme? Maybe that’s it: WhatAmIMssing?
The goose’s common
Stealing the common from the goose. That’s the killer line.
Call me an armchair activist, champagne socialist, library liberal, achronistic anarchist, but The Goose’s Common is the final theme proposal for today.
Heroes and villains
Nods and winks. Doffed caps, slow claps and dagger stares.
MC Hammer. You can’t touch this.
John Beddell, AKA Bensozia, continues to bring me pleasure more mornings than not with his wonderful blog, although I do not share his taste in art.
Paul Skallas, AKA Lindyman, spells things out in his newsletter which seem obvious or simplistic but often aren’t. If you don’t know the concept, it’s well worth reading up on lindy.
Seeing his name in the Daily Mail (hawk, spit) over someone’s shoulder I am reminded that I loathe Douglas Murray.
Amusement arcade
I consume, therefore I am…
Visual. Behind Her Eyes on Netflix, 6/10. OK while double-screening, with a strange late leap into what it calls astral projection. Simona Brown was very watchable. Eve Hewson less so.
I daydreamed about buying this Ivon Hitchens painting of the splendidly named Wittenham Clumps, which is up for auction. I marvelled at 25% buyers fees, plus VAT for doing…what exactly? Worse value than estate agents. Platform Pravileges.
Audio. Early Charlatans, Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque, Chief Ebeneezer Obey. DJ Harvey. Carl Craig - Landcruising. The Rolling Stones - Tattoo You, which seems the blueprint for so much else including The Clash, and Primal Scream and…
Food. Many good things roasted in a new heavy iron roasting pan - onions, garlic, parsnips, new potatoes, sweet long peppers, bell peppers, carrots, beetroot, frsh thyme, pine nuts, chicken thighs - plus experimenting with late glazes of passata, balsamic, wine, soy. Also pan-fried sea bass. Dapanji. Shakshuka.
Internet. A wonderful collection of old British accents. Accents are homogenising, but they haven’t gone yet. This is a pro-diversity newsletter FWIW. Plus an actor does 600 years of London accents.
Iceberger was more fun than it had any right to be, and of course all my friends just drew cocks.
Purchases. Sony WF-1000XM3 earpods. Not revolutionary. Clunky UX but pleasingly mushroom-coloured like early eighties tech.