ribbonfarm

I can’t remember where I read the theory, but apparently the salinity of our bodies matches that of primordial seas, so in a sense we never really left the oceans. Our micro-organic aquatic ancestors simply constructed meatbag spaceships with artificial life-support aquatic environments inside to explore beyond their oceanic home world. Much as we might construct generation starships in the future to travel to Alpha Centauri. Air-breathing multi-cellular life forms constitute the space program of primordial single-celled life. They get the missing resources of their primordial environment through clever artificial means, just as we might eventually mine our essential minerals from asteroids or gas clouds we fly by in outer space.

One of the effects of this evolutionary history is that all air-breathing life has to seek out perhaps the most important chemical that’s ubiquitous in the oceans but not trivial to find on land: salt. Salt-seeking is one of the most fundamental behaviors of terrestrial life. Animals in the wild seek out salt licks even at great risk of predation. Humans with salt deficiencies have serious problems, and beyond a point of salt deprivation, you die.

This evolutionary history struck me as an interesting metaphor, and a superior alternative to the more familiar metaphor of “coming up for air.”

Oxygen, whether extracted from the air or water, is critical on very short time-scales, even by the standards of the lifespans of micro-organisms. You die in minutes without it. So the idea that you might be so swamped by work that you need to “come up for air” is evocative but not quite coherent. I can think of coming up for other kinds of macro-nutrients like water and food at the time scales of uninterrupted work (hours/days) but not air. If you’ve ever actually had to “come up for air” (I did a couple of times as a kid while learning to swim) you know it’s not some sort of restorative break. It’s a panic-inducing emergency of a sort that is not metaphorically like anything else.

But salt-seeking… now that’s an interesting metaphor that operates on a whole different time-scale. If you don’t lose any salt to perspiration, you can go without salt intake for days to weeks (it’s not so much a consumable nutrient as a sort of electrolyte concentration thing I guess).

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The planet Kinsoro, in a star system on the edge of the Bracket nebula, had a strange climate marked by long alternating periods of wonderful and terrible climates. Each phase of the climatic cycle (whose origins were mysterious) lasted approximately 120 Earth years. The strange climate had given rise to an equally strange ecology early in the planet’s history: The more complex species were all polymorphic, typically existing in two forms adapted to the two regimes (and occasionally as many as six, adapted to minor climate epicycles). The dominant species, the Kinsorans, existed in two adult forms, which Kinsoran biologists called the S-type and the I-type. The two types had clear but minor physical differences, but more importantly, dramatically different behavioral and cognitive dispositions. While both types could survive both climates, the S-type flourished in the wonderful half-cycles, while the I-types flourished during the terrible half-cycles.

Kinsoran biologists calculated that the environmental variation ought to lead to a slow 240-year limit cycle in the S/I ratio between 80:20 and 20:80, but in practice the ratio showed much more extreme variation: swinging between 99:1 to 1:99. The reason was not hard to discover; during each half-cycle, the dominant type would violent repress and slaughter the subordinate type to near-extinction.

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My 2-volume collection of essays about independent consulting and life in the gig economy, The Art of Gig, is finally out. It is available in paperback and Kindle ebook form on Amazon.

For those of you who have no idea what this is about, between 2019-21 I wrote a limited-run Substack newsletter on the indie consulting life and the gig economy. About 2/3 of the newsletter issues were non-fiction essays. These are compiled into the two volumes above. All the essays have been carefully edited, updated, grouped into hopefully useful sections, and sequenced. The material flows surprisingly smoothly, if I do say so myself. The images and diagrams have been up-res’d, updated, and in some cases, entirely redrawn for the books.

As the subtitles suggest, Volume 1 establishes some foundational ideas, and Volume 2 builds on those foundations. Both volumes are at a roughly intermediate level of sophistication, and should be accessible to anyone with at least a year or two of work experience. If you’re in the gig economy, are considering diving into it, or have been unceremoniously tossed into it by layoffs and such, I suspect these volumes might be useful to you. They should also be valuable to recent graduates thinking about alternatives to traditional career paths, though I suspect the material will be harder to grok without at least a little work experience under your belt.

Since we’re just heading into the holiday season, you might want to consider gifting these books to any friends and family members who need a bit of a kick in the pants to think more creatively about their careers.

This is my first foray into print since Tempo 11 years ago, and it took quite a bit of effort to get the paperbacks done (it’s like 3x more work than ebooks alone). So everybody who’s been bugging me to do print editions of my books had better buy them. If this works out well, I might consider going back and doing print editions of my older ebook-only volumes.

Thanks to my collaborator, publishing veteran Jenna Dixon, I think both the ebook and print volumes turned out beautifully. Grace Witherell, my long-time artist collaborator, made the covers. I think she nailed the Sun Tzu Art of War homage I was going for perfectly. And huge thanks to the ~4k readers of the original newsletter. I’m not great at just going off by myself to write book-length things. I need weekly doses of validation to write, and the newsletter subscribers provided that in spades. The concluding section of Volume 2 has 3 chapters worth of Q&A, and I’ll be sending out complimentary copies of the books to people whose questions are featured.

Here’s the link to the page with both formats of both volumes again: The Art of Gig. The Kindle editions are $9.99 and the paperbacks are $18.95 each.

I’ll get around to making these available via more distribution channels eventually (non-Amazon paperback distribution, other e-readers). The Kindle versions should be available worldwide, but the paperbacks will currently only be available in markets where Amazon has print-on-demand fulfillment going.

Boosting, reviews, sharing on email lists etc. would be much appreciated. If you host a podcast on themes related to the books (gig economy, free agency, consulting, creator economy etc. etc.) I am happy to come on to shamelessly shill them, and talk shop. At least until I run out of social energy. Depending on timing/location, I may also be able to take on speaking gigs based on the books.

Many people have asked, but I currently have no plans to convert the material into an online course. But I might make a video or something. Or at least a nice slide deck (the books have a lot of diagrams in them, which I kinda want to do more with). If you run a course for which this material is relevant, I’m open to dropping by to do a guest session or Q&A. I’m not entirely sure this stuff lends itself to live delivery formats, but I’ll try at least a few experiments.

But Wait, There’s More!

The newsletter also featured an absurdist sci-fi/fantasy consulting fiction series (I think I invented this genre) set in a universe I call the Yakverse. This material is not included in the two volumes above.

I have different, more experimental plans for getting that material out next year. I know many of you were looking forward to that material in particular, but I suspect you’ll enjoy whatever I come up with better than if I’d just turned them into a third volume.

As you may know if you’ve been reading me for a while, this whole newsletter project was inspired by my 2015 short story, The Art of Gig, which was later retconned into the fiction series as a prelude. So you can read that online now for a taste of the Yakverse stuff to come.

I also have other random collateral stuff sitting around from the newsletter project, like a card game, a set of 100 consulting tips (included in Volume 2 as an epilogue) that I made into a learning deck, and silly Yakverse artifacts like coins. I’m still mulling what to do with all that. Suggestions welcome.

I have a rudimentary Book/Project Website at artofgig.com. Right now it just has the basic stuff about the books, but any future developments will unfold there.

One of the most rewarding things to come out of this whole project so far was the Yak Collective, our 3-year-old band of indies doing random creative projects together. If you’re looking for somewhere to go to chat about the themes and ideas of the books, there’s no better place. We have study groups going on interesting topics, a rover-building project, and more.

Anyway, thanks again to everybody who made these books possible. Now go buy them.

This week is probably the closest we’ve ever gotten in my lifetime to the brink of nuclear-powered World War 3, yet people seem strangely indifferent to the developments. I share in this under-reaction. Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, have a stronger collective reaction?

There’s of course other stuff going on–a potentially extreme climate-change-amplified hurricane, the UK economy collapsing, and so on–but all that does seem to be categorically of a lower order. Visa shared this meme that gets at this feeling of curious under-reaction.

As Steve Walsh said in a reply, “I suspect this is actually how people in 2022 would receive UFO’s.” I agree with that assessment. Aliens landing would be at least a couple of levels of weird past nuclear World War 3, but I don’t think we have it in us anymore to generate reactions a couple of levels more intense. There is something exhausted about the collective human psyche right now. It’s been battered so relentlessly for so long with things calling for reactions (either practical, or in the form of futile derangement syndromes) that we’re at saturation. We can’t respond any more strongly. We can’t get any more deranged than we already are.

Hunter S. Thompson famously remarked that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Well, we can’t turn any more pro at this point.

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The word tangle is generally used pejoratively in the English language, as in Walter Scott’s line, Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Or at least disapprovingly, as in tangled mess. Darwin’s usage, in the last passage of The Origin of the Species, is the only famous example I know of where the word is used in an approving way:

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

The Darwinian notion of a tangle can be understood as a snapshot of a robust, open, evolutionary process, with all the optimality and efficiency properties that entails or doesn’t (I would summarize it as “a mediocre slouching towards continued existence”). Darwin goes on to link his evocative observation directly to his theory of natural selection, but I think the idea of a tangle is more general, and has roots in the fundamental mathematical structure of reality. Take for instance, this picture of various optimal packings from a great thread of many such examples by Daniel Piker (thanks to all who responded to my twitter prompt looking for this sort of thing):

These are very simple examples of a large class of things I define to be proper tangles: complex things that are efficient but not orderly. And you know what these pictures remind me of? Traffic in India.

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We live in a world shaped by, and highly conducive to, discrete or 0/1 thinking. But not so long ago, we lived in a world shaped by, and highly conducive to, a kind of thinking you could call continuous, or ε/δ (epsilon/delta) thinking.

The basic idea behind ε/δ thinking is to think of the world primarily in terms of change, and secondarily in terms of extremely smooth, in fact infinitely smooth types of change. The symbols ε and δ are known as infinitesimals — quantities that can approach zero arbitrarily closely. The δ refers to an arbitrarily small input, while the ε refers to the corresponding arbitrarily small output.

The discrete, or 0/1 view of the world is fundamentally built around the fiction of being. Things either are or aren’t. Change is an illusion. “Things” merely get “created” and “destroyed.” 0s turn into 1s and 1s turn into 0s. There are no gray areas, merely insufficient bits of precision. There is no smoothness, merely ontologies beyond resolution limits. Reality is quantized.

The continuous, or ε/δ view of the world is fundamentally built around the fiction of becoming. Things always are (or equivalently, never are; in a becoming-centric view, it doesn’t really matter). There is no creation or destruction. Things just become more or less beingy.

Thinking about this stuff always reminds me of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, which goes from being a 0/1 cat to being an ε/δ cat:

“Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.

“I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

I suspect Carrol intended this as commentary on discrete/continuous mathematics, including the little bit of wordplay about pig/fig (which reads to me like a joke about ε/δ adjacency ambiguities exposed by comprehension noise in a notionally discrete symbol space). There’s a world of philosophical fun in this one passage.

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I haven’t been in a creative blogging mood for a month, thanks to oven-like conditions in Los Angeles these past few weeks, and of course the general Augustiness of August, the Armpit of the year. August gets Augustier every year thanks to climate change. Even the less demanding kind of writing I now reserve for my newsletter (periodic reminder — I have a paid substack called Ribbonfarm Studio that is stylistically downstream of the R&D mode of this blog) has been hard to do.

Anyhow, the funk seems to be lifting a bit now. I just landed in India for a long-overdue visit with my parents, and in what feels like a sign of the times, it’s actually much cooler and pleasanter here. California is enduring mega droughts on a millennial scale, while South Asia is experiencing extreme rain and flooding. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Anthropocene is here in earnest now. If I had to pick a poison, I’d definitely pick too much rain over too little.

Though the trip here was not exactly fun (post-Covid international travel has its burdens), I’m already feeling productively knocked out of the claustrophobic uncreative rut I’d gotten myself into over the last few years. For starters, the view from my parents’ balcony (the one on the left) is a refreshing change from the view from my own back in LA.

Anyhow, just dropping this quick note here to keep the lights on here at ribbonfarm while I proceed to Seek Inspiration and get at least one of several experimental drafts across the finish line.