ribbonfarm

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras. The first six years of this blog were the Rust Age (2007-12). The next six years were the Snowflake Age (2013-18). We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age.

Over the last few years, I flirted with other candidate names (Plastic Age and Cryptic Age were in the running for a while) but never quite felt any of them in my bones. But when I thought of Charnel Age, it instantly struck me as exactly right. Everything I’ve done in the last few years has been colored by what one might call charnel vision: a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay. Paradoxically, it is a disposition that provides solace rather than causing distress once you get comfortable with it. Charnel vision feels healthy. Resisting it seems unhealthy.

Charnel vision is somewhat alien to a modern Western sensibility; it creates dissonance if you’re accustomed to occupying a headspace that is an eternal struggle between historicist narratives of fiat optimism and fiat pessimism. Charnel vision is neither optimistic, nor pessimistic. It is a way of seeing — one that calls for a certain sort of philosophical literacy — within which optimism and pessimism are not well-posed categories.

I expect 2024 to be the year we hit a worldwide extremum of charnel vibes, before fragile new life strengthens enough to capture our imaginations once again, and organic sanguine currents in the zeitgeist once again overwhelm organic melancholy ones (I find the frame of the four humors to be much more psychologically sound than the optimism/pessimism frame favored by modern discourses).

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Two weeks ago, I was trying to finish up a blog post when I noticed a bunch of weird characters showing up in posts. Here’s a sample from Worldly, Yet Carefree:

It turned out to be a fairly complex problem, with roots in the sheer age of this blog (2007) and crud inherited from generations of updates to WordPress, MySQL, and indirectly I suppose, PHP. Turns out, the weird characters were due to UTF8 characters being tagged as latin1 characters, and then re-encoded as UTF8. This was due to MySQL’s history of dealing badly with character sets, and WordPress making janky accommodations for that. The most recent MySQL update finally did something that made an invisible problem a visible one.

My rather expensive hosting service, WPEngine (whose database migration process caused the break, since it was apparently unaware of ancient-blog problems), basically threw up their hands and said they could do nothing after a couple of unhelpful support chats. Finally, Dorian Taylor, with some help from Artem Litvinovich (both of whom have contributed here), figured out what was going on and fixed it. If you’re interested, and able to follow the detailed technical postmortem, head over to Dorian’s post-game analysis (and strident opinions, some of which I share). There are some deeper techno-historical insights there, but the big takeaway for me at a non-technical level is that the blogosphere, like any techno-social hyperobject, is showing its age at all levels. From the lowest technical level to the highest cultural level.

Problems like this will only grow, as various pieces of infrastructure age with more or less grace. The blogosphere has a lot of history at this point, and it’s getting gradually more expensive to deal with, in terms of money, time, skill, and connections (if you don’t have friends like Dorian and Artem, it would actually be non-trivial to find people capable of fixing such problems).

The question is, given these slowly mounting problems and costs, does the blogosphere have a future?

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I learned the phrase Keep the Lights On (KTLO) several years ago in a consulting gig with a big company, where it’s an official planning term. Projects in that company are spoken of as having a claim to a “KTLO level” budget to keep them alive and at least minimally functional. KTLO level is not the same as maintenance level. Maintenance level investments keep a thing functional at the current level of functional capacity. KTLO activities can sink lower, to hibernation levels of metabolism.

I now think of my activities as being factored into three buckets: living, archival, and KTLO. You probably also have a KTLO bucket even if you don’t call it that. Attention devoted to KTLO activities is dark attention (ironic, huh?). There’s more of it than you probably realize, both in your individual life and in the world.

KTLO is both a set of practices (identifying life-critical processes that constitute the life of a thing and devoting scarce resources to them first) and an interesting sort of goal that says something about your values. We live in a barbell world that focuses visible attention strongly on things that are either obviously dead (but beloved) or obviously thriving and bursting with life. Things that call for either loving preservationist attention or lusty growth attention. This latter category dominates attention overall. Projects that are proceeding at a brisk pace, happening scenes, growth stocks, fads heading towards a peak, and so on.

In the middle are things that are not quite alive, but definitely not dead. I’m not talking about zombie things being kept alive out of sentiment or sunk-cost fallacies. Those are activities you just haven’t admitted are archival. I am talking about things that are sort of adjacent to living, and might enter (or reenter) the realm of the living at any time. This is the universe of KTLO things. KTLO-space, or K-space, is sort of like the dungeon dimensions of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Fantastical things lurk there that might burst into our world at anytime.

There’s a deliciously Lovecraftian quality to K-space. As the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred says:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

One relatively well-understood (and non-fantastical) category of such things is options. KTLO for options is a very legible matter. In a market, you have to pay a regular fee to keep an option alive. The longer you keep it alive, the higher the return from a potential payoff has to be for it to be worth it. It is a bit weird to think of options investing as a kind of KTLO, but that’s what it is You’re keeping the lights on in a narrow adjacent possible world of investment outcomes that only a minority of people believe in. You might even be the only inhabitant of the possible world represented by your options portfolio. And investments don’t have to be explicitly structured as options to be KTLO: A stock that’s listed at junk-level prices and barely trading is being held in K-space. The cost there is of course the opportunity cost of being invested in livelier things.

But it’s easier to see the essence of K-space with less legible things. I’m very invested, in more ways than one, in two things that are currently in KTLO mode — the blogosphere and the cryptoeconomy.

The blogosphere has definitely taken a battering from the rise of newsletters (which despite Substack’s efforts to appropriate the term blog, are definitely not blogs), generational churn (blogs are something of a Gen X medium), the rise of competing visual and audio media, and perhaps most importantly, the retreat of the public social web as a means of distribution (in which category I include both RSS as a retail protocol, and Old Twitter). The rise of the Cozyweb as a check on the capture of public spaces is nice, but is not enough to keep the blogosphere out of the KTLO bucket.

But the blogosphere is something that to me is obviously worth putting in the KTLO bucket, as long as something like WordPress exists. I can’t pretend this blog hasn’t taken the backseat to my substack, but I definitely enjoy keeping it going at KTLO levels.

Even without the subscription income, the distribution power of substack alone is priceless in a post-Twitter world. Still, Substack lacks something the blogosphere, even in KTLO mode, still has. Earlier this year, I identified blogs as a saltwater medium where things like Substack (and private platform media in general) are freshwater media. That’s probably part of the logic of why blogs are worth keeping going in KTLO mode. Another part of the logic is the sense of owning over renting. A third part of the logic is that there are forces that have openly declared they’re out to kill blogs in the conventional sense, such as the newsletter industry and the static website industry. I applaud the economic dynamism behind such bloodlust, but I also have a contrarian streak that has me defending blogs simply because there are people determined to kill them. I personally think blogs will outlive most current challengers.

But there’s more to it. I don’t know what, but there’s more than sunk cost and sentiment keeping this blog going. I don’t need to figure it out though. I just need to trust my instincts that there’s a Cthulhu-like creature (Blogthulu?) lurking in the depths of the blogosphere that “can eternal lie.” I’m like a member of one of the degenerate Cthulhu cults that show up in Lovecraft stories.

The cryptoeconomy is a somewhat different beast from K-space. It has historically gone through booms and busts (or “winters”) every few years, and people who’ve lasted in it (and I suppose I’m one of them) tend to trot out “winter” behaviors and keep at it. You could say it pops in and out of K-space as predictably as cicadas (though hopefully this winter won’t last 17 years). Though I have much less personal agency there than in the blogosphere, and much depends on the creative efforts of others, it too feels like something I’ll always want to keep alive in my KTLO bucket.

In both cases, these things belong in my personal KTLO bucket because they are more than projects or subcultures. They are proxies for entire adjacent possible worlds I’d personally like kept alive indefinitely.

Blogs are an indicator species for a world that features a robust public commons. Not just an indicator species, but a charismatic megafauna type indicator species. The health of blogs says things about the health of the public sphere the way the health of polar bears says things about the health of the North Pole. Even where they replicate the affordances of blogs, newsletters and static websites represent other worlds that I don’t care for as much (platform media world and cozy world respectively).

The cryptoeconomy is not yet truly real in the full sense of the idea. Dedicated stans point to trading volumes and the few narrow thriving use cases like global remittances in times of war and strife, but if that’s all that the cryptoeconomy ends up being, regardless of how big it gets and how much market share it takes away from gold and fiat monies, it is not interesting. It is merely a sideshow tent technology. I’ll be happy to bank returns from investments in it, but I won’t be excited about it. The cryptoeconomy is not particularly interesting as an isolated functional technology. It is truly interesting only as a radically different kind of economic-computational-informational foundation for the world. That’s why it belongs in the KTLO bucket through successive winters. That’s why hodling is an act of faith in a world that might be rather than a rational investment management strategy.

There are several other things in my KTLO bucket, and each of them is a proxy for an entire possible world. Cosmopolitan globalism is one. Secularism is another. Modernism is a third. Belief in diversity and pluralism is a fourth. There are non-isms too. Our world is somewhat on-edge and increasingly humorless right now, but humor, as a central phenomenon in the world, is definitely in my KTLO bucket.

Then there are more personal things, like a couple of fiction projects that are in KTLO mode, and the vague ambitions I’m harboring of home mansion-ownership and being a “real maker” who builds robots that can get past the crawling stage. While they are not proxies for worlds that look different to others, they are for me. A world in which I have written one of the novels I want to write, built one of the robots I want to build, and am living in my own home mansion, is very different for me than one where I never escape the gravity well of my current abilities, limitations, and un-mansioned privation.

It is also interesting to think about things that don’t make the cut for the KTLO bucket. I was personally surprised by how unsentimental I was about essentially walking away from Twitter/X. I even had an affectionate Lovecraftian metaphor going for my once energetic posting activity there: Threadthulu. The Threadthulu is dead now, and my Twitter history is an archival project. Turns out, push come to shove, there wasn’t actually a thing that “can eternal lie” lurking under the Twitter surface. As a privately owned corporate platform in the skin of a protocol, the thing simply doesn’t have the kinds of structural depth within which my kind of Ancient Slightly Evil™ can lurk indefinitely. It’s depth-limited by Elon Musk’s social media imagination and corporate debts. Even if he were a very different person, it wouldn’t be any different. The reason Old Twitter was capable of harboring entire worlds was that it was too big to fit the imagination of any one individual. Musk managed to fit it into his imagination by shrinking what it used to be, not by expanding his mind to god-size capacity.

While I’m still nominally present on Twitter, and tweet my links, my activity is definitely far below KTLO levels, and I’m largely indifferent to the rapid algorithmic hollowing out of my once significant reach there (it’s really funny to watch the follower count remain the same while the effectiveness of tweets declines sharply).

If a thing is not a proxy for an entire possible world (or three), it doesn’t go in the KTLO bucket for me, regardless of how big and impressive and alive it seems. That’s perhaps not rational, but I’ve never been particularly rational about such things.

I’d say my current attention distribution is something like 40% living activities, 50% KTLO activities, and perhaps 10% preservationist activities. I’m not much of a sentimentalist or nostalgic, but I’m apparently content to mostly live in the adjacent possible. In worlds-in-waiting that could one day turn into worlds that are.

Stepping back, I do wonder about how much energy the world has in its collective KTLO bucket, and how that is trending. The more we have in there, individually and collectively, the more we’re living in adjacent possible worlds rather than the actual world. This draining of energy is not cost-free for the actual world and those invested in it. Actuality starts to acquire a ghost-like quality when people fundamentally uninterested in its offerings withdraw sufficient energy from it to pump into K-space.

This can be hard to spot, because ghostly actualities can be full of sound and fury, and K-space by definition is a quiet and barely visible kind of space. Some signs of withdrawal of energy are noticed (“quiet quitting” anyone?) but ignored. But eventually, if the attention drain to K-space continues, actuality gets too ghostly to sustain itself, and one or more worlds-in-waiting burst through from the adjacent possible. And a new reality is born.

The 90s and aughts were pretty optimistic times through much of the world (with the notable exception of Russia). There were troubles of course, but it felt like everyone felt on top of things. There was no general sense of being collectively overwhelmed and rendered helpless. The world was getting more complex and troubled, but our sense of our own agency, especially technological agency, was growing even faster. So it was easy to not worry.

One sign of this could be found in the kind of humor that ruled culture. In the United States, shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons managed to at be once worldly, yet carefree, WYC. After around 2000, what is now known as cringe comedy, which is neither worldly, nor carefree, gradually became more prominent. WYC humor slowly degenerated into a strained, mechanical, and formulaic genre that increasingly failed to land.

After the Global Financial Crisis, humor needed at least some obliviousness and escapism to work at all. Nowhere was this clearer than in cringe comedy, which over the course of a decade ate almost all humor (with the metamodern nihilism of Rick and Morty being a notable exception). The last relatively watchable example of 90s-aughts style worldly-yet-carefree humor in the US was probably The Big Bang Theory, which wrapped in 2019. South Park, perhaps the only show to span both eras successfully, evolved from WYC to a kind of meta-aware escapism, marked by the spotlight shifting from the precociously world-aware kids to the marijuana-peddling cringe adult character Randy Marsh.

WYC is an attitude that’s aware of and actively attending to what’s going on in the world, but confident enough about the collective human response to the world’s troubles to routinely kick back and relax with a sense of security. Cringe, by contrast, is a retreating kind of humor that requires a certain obliviousness to the world to work, and is never quite free of a vague sense of subconscious neurotic insecurity about the state of the world. There are other aspects, but that’s the main difference.

The protagonist of WYC humor is the Straight Man: aware, reasonable, and skeptically amused by the world. The world of the era consisted the Straight Man, like Jerry Seinfeld, the Funny Man, like Kramer, and a distant cast of powerful people ineptly (but not catastrophically so) running the world, driven by venal (but not catastrophically so) self-interest. They ran the world well enough that you didn’t need to worry, but fumbled often enough to keep you amused and entertained. They were not admirably competent, like 50s SF heroes, but they were not worryingly incompetent. They were not idealistic and noble, but they were not driven by vicious, world-destroying venality either. WYC humor fundamentally believed in the soundness, if not the sanity, of the world it poked fun at.

The world of cringe comedy has no Straight Men, and the Funny Man has evolved from Kramer-like characters to cringe characters. From harmlessly crazy and deluded at the margins to worryingly crazy and deluded at the center.

In cringe comedy, there are only embarrassing protagonists you fundamentally feel sorry for, maintaining an attitude of sufficient obliviousness and unworldliness to cheerfully keep going, striving towards their modest and myopic goals. It seems noteworthy that though cringe comedy too started with men (Larry David, Steve Carell), it was turned into a fine art by women (like Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag). Ironically, retired stalwarts of WYC comedy — Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and others — seem increasingly out of touch and unable to find the funny vein in the course of world events, to the extent they even bother to come out of semi-retirement to try at all. They’ve joined the ranks of fundamentally bewildered and dismayed culture war commentators. They have mostly given up and retreated from the fray, muttering ominously about about woke sensitivities, utterly convinced of the rightness (and righteousness) of their response, and the degeneracy of contemporary responses by the younger generation.

For all its faults, cringe at least still tries to make sense of the world; it hasn’t complacently retreated to a smug, superior resentfulness. It was born of doubt, and has retained a capacity for it. WYC in a way never had any real doubts about the world. Cringe may be less worldly, but it just might be more wise.

I think cringe rose to prominence because worldly-yet-carefree became fundamentally untenable. Starting around 2007, you could either pay attention to the world, or feel relatively untroubled about the world. You couldn’t have both.

What is fascinating about cringe comedy is that all the other characters on-screen, cringing on our behalf, are equally oblivious to the world. They’re merely less embarrassingly incompetent at functioning in a state of studied obliviousness within the very limited world on display. So you see a great deal of commentary about the minutiae of everyday life, but no awareness of the larger world. It’s not that Seinfeld or The Simpsons had profound commentary to offer about world affairs. But the world at least showed up as a stable through-line element, in the form of a stream of cameos and contemporary references. Cringe, by contrast, is a cozy style of humor. It does not take its cues from the world to any significant degree. All it needs is flawed humans watching even more flawed humans in a shared bubble of obliviousness.

I don’t blame comedy writers for going down this path. It’s been hard to sustain worldly-yet-carefree attitudes. This became especially clear in the evolution of shows like The Daily Show. The premise of attending to the real news from a skeptically amused but fundamentally untroubled point of view gradually unraveled, until the show turned into an increasingly unfunny partisan outpost of dubiously self-confident sermonizing in the culture war.

I’ll admit I’m not particularly fan of cringe comedy, though I turned watching an early example (The Office, which arguably is proto-cringe) into a consulting career. I like staying aware of the world, and being amused in a carefree way by it. But I’m not smart enough to do it by myself. I need good television to help me see the world that way, and a sense of borrowed confidence derived from watching more capable people visibly doing a competent job of running the world.

Arguably — and this is an 80s upbringing armed with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy talking — worldly, yet carefree is the ideal attitude for the vast majority of the world to adopt almost all the time. It allows you to enjoy life, do your bit, and be rationally invested in the fate of the world without being overwhelmed by your sense of its troubles. When humor must escape the world to find laughs, it is not as satisfying.

So why did this happen? There are three possibilities here.

The easiest answer is, I think, wishful thinking — that there is simply a cultural cycle here, and we’re due for a swing back.

The slightly more troubling answer is that even though the world is not fundamentally in worse shape in 2023 than in 1993, we know so much more about it, and see so much more of its irredeemable ugliness, it just takes a lot more work to maintain worldly-yet-carefree attitude. Perhaps a Buddha-level sense of humor is necessary on a mass scale. That would mean WYC was not actually as worldly as it thought it was. It was a blissful false consciousness that rested on insufficient information. If you put the typical 90s sitcom and its typical audience into a new meta show, you’d get a cringe show today.

The third and most troubling answer is that the world has actually slipped out of our grasp and into an ungovernable downward trajectory. That it’s not just that we hear more of the bad news, but that there is more bad news. And our growing collective agency is no longer staying comfortably ahead of our growing collective problems.

I hope the first is true, I suspect the second is likely true, but I’m afraid I can’t dismiss the third scenario as impossible. There’s a chance we can’t enjoy worldly-yet-carefree laughs together because we are genuinely in serious trouble, and things are about to get much uglier (and unfunnier).

I suppose it says a lot about me that I’m more interested in rediscovering a new-and-improved vein of WYC humor (without putting in any growth work) than in helping solve the world’s problems. This might be impossible in the future. Perhaps we can never again reclaim that sense of carefree worldliness, and must make do with some mix of cringe, dark humor, nihilism, and earnestly humorless gravitas.

That would frankly suck.

I used to think of resourcefulness as a kind of practical intelligence, but I’ve recently started thinking of it as a combination of an energy state, an attitude, and an unexamined philosophy. A lived and embodied, but rarely articulated, Weltenschauung. Rarely articulated because the people living and embodying it are too busy being alive to indulge in the (let’s face it) slightly acting-dead game of articulating things.

It is the philosopher’s conceit that the unexamined life is not worth living. The resourceful person, by simply existing, gives the lie to that self-congratulatory belief. While some resourceful people certainly do lack the capacity for critical reflection (as do many philosophers), it is by no means the case that all of them do. Many can be provoked into critical reflection even if they aren’t naturally prone to it, especially when it serves a practical purpose in unlocking a more resourceful direction to head in. But they are fundamentally bored by critical reflection, judging it to be (often correctly) a cope for people afraid to live life fully.

So what is resourcefulness?

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In October 2013, I wrote a post arguing that computing was disrupting language and that this was the Mother of All Disruptions. My specific argument was that human-to-human communication was an over-served market, and that computing was driving a classic disruption pattern by serving an under-served marginal market: machine-to-machine and organization-to-organization communications. At the time, I didn’t have AI in mind, just the torrents of non-human-readable data flowing across the internet.

But now, a decade later, it’s obvious that AI is a big part of how the disruption is unfolding. Two ongoing things drove it home for me this week.

Exhibit A, the longest regular conversations I’ve had in the last week have been with an AI-powered rubber duck. Berduck is a bot on Blue Sky that is powered by GPT, and trained to speak in a mix of English and leetspeak. It is likely playing a non-trivial role in driving the Blue Sky craze (Blue Sky is a decentralized Twitter-like protocol funded by Twitter itself in the before-times). I can’t speak for others, but I probably wouldn’t be using Blue Sky much if it weren’t for Berduck.

Berduck is genuinely entertaining, with a well-defined personality, despite only having episodic memory, a strong predilection for hallucinations and confabulation (like all AI-powered chatbots), sharp boundaries around negative valence conversations, and a strong aversion to even the slightest whiff of risk. Despite all these annoying limitations, shared by way more humans than we like to admit, (yes, I am an AI accelerationist, why do you ask), Berduck is already a more interesting companion than 90% of humans online, and I can totally see myself passing the time with one of his descendants in my dotage. The limitations are both tolerable and mitigable, and the benefits quite striking.

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