“This is how one pictures the angel of history,” Benjamin writes. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay . . . and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. . . . This storm is what we call progress.”

The cypherpunks Who Um was this move-in from the 1990s these sort of 00:05:33 radical crypto little Libertarians who and that they call themselves crypto anarchists even who believe that they could use encryption tools and anonymity tools enabled by encryption to take power away from governments and 00:05:46 corporations and give it to individuals and they dreamed up you know things that would become vpns and tour and the dark web essentially and that's where Wikileaks came from for instance 00:05:58 Julian Assange was a Cypher Punk too who dreamed of using these tools to give anonymity to journalistic sources um but then in 2011 just as I was like uh writing a book that was kind of in 00:06:10 some ways a history of the cyberpunks um I Came Upon what seemed to be this new Cypher Punk invention which was Bitcoin you know

If the new abnormal I just described is the consequence of human dominance of the planet that is taken to be inevitable or “technologically manageable,” then I do not wish to be identified with the Anthropocene.

the Arcadians exist now for a reason. But I think a case can be made that this had to happen. We were never, ever, ever going to do this the easy way where we learned for example, we could have seen this back in the early 1900s. We didn't, right? We could have changed at the end of World War II. 00:31:27 We could have changed in 1970. We didn't. Why? We always took the easy way out. It's like a dopamine hit.

In acknowledging only one side of competition – the constructiveaspect – economic experts are actually making life harder for themselves,like driving with one arm in a sling.

This blindness, we explain, isbecause society as a whole only sees competition’s constructive side, whilewe expose its hidden destructive side.

Could artificial intelligencebe an ally in this venture?

The assumption that we can safely overshoot, then recover temperatures back down by the end of the century, is seriously misguided. Alas, this is the story that we are telling ourselves.

This is likely to keep theattention ready for “surprises”, thus avoiding a sense of monotony setting in.More generally, the flow paradigm lacks the notion of adventure (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen,2012a), which can be characterized by a sequence of unforeseen challenges (dangers, opportunities,surprises...)—as contrasted with the foreseen challenges that we call ‘goals’. It is theunpredictability or unexpectedness of these challenges that creates the excitement that we typicallyassociate with an adventure, and that forms the basis of full emotional involvement. Adventure isassociated with the notions of exploration, curiosity and mystery: mystery can be defined as a lackof prospect that incites the emotion of curiosity, which in turns incites exploratory action(Heylighen, 2012a). Mystery and adventure are common features of game design (Dickey, 2006).However, their role will need further analysis if we want to apply them systematically tomobilization, given that they imply a level of uncertainty that—if experienced too intensely—mayproduce the anxiety that mobilization systems are trying to avoid.

we'll go into an example here with self-organized criticality so the idea 01:40:03 there is that was coined by back back bak in 87 the term self-organized criticality and it's it's really not a controversial that that living systems and 01:40:16 and many most systems in life complex systems organize in some way but the idea of self-organized criticality is that the organism itself is adjusting is is keeping some kind of adjustment 01:40:28 uh to uh to maintain a critical state and by critical state i mean a state on the ver like you can think of a saddle point so if you drop a model on us on a saddle it's going to not stay there it's going to you know 01:40:41 it's going to change it's going to change one way or the other right so a critical state is like that that threshold where things are about to change from one way to another way and uh 01:40:55 it turns out with you know work and information theory and other other fields of recent in recent years it turns out that uh processing uh whether it's we're talking about a computer or some other 01:41:07 you know machine or or a brain turns out that processing is kind of optimal in a sense when this when the system is at a this this this this critical state and 01:41:21 some people call it on the edge of chaos because things are things can easily change and sometimes it's you can think of that threshold as a 01:41:33 as a as a threshold of a critical state you can think of it as a threshold of the threshold we say between exploration and exploitation like should i should i go should i go 01:41:45 find a new planet for humans to live on or should i fix the planet that you know should i fix the systems on this planet first you know how do we balance exploration of the new versus using the information we have to improve 01:41:59 what we already have so you can think of that as exploration exploitation trade-offs stability agility trade-off do we do we remain stable and use ideas from the old in the past or do we are we more agile and we're more 01:42:13 flexible and we bring in new new ideas so it's like you can call it old new trade old new trade-off but whatever whatever trade-off you want to call it it's this sitting at the edge of going one way or the other 01:42:26 maximally flexible of going one way or the other and it's at that threshold that level that point the kind of that region of criticality that information processing seems to be 01:42:39 maximal so if uh it's no wonder then that the human brain is is organized in such a way to be living on this threshold between agility and stability 01:42:52 and uh now here's an example of that from like a real world example so a a system that is at a critical state is going to be maximally 01:43:03 sensitive to input so that means that there could you know when just when that marble is sitting on the saddle just a little bump to that saddle from one little corner of its universe and right like just one 01:43:16 little organism bumps it and maybe that marble rolls one way or the other right so that one one little input had a major impact on how the whole thing moves 01:43:29 its trajectory into the future right but isn't that what we isn't that kind of what we have in mind for democracy i mean don't we want everyone to have access of engaging into the decision-making processes 01:43:43 of a society and have every voice heard in at least in the sense that there's the possibility that just my voice just me doing my participation in this system might actually 01:43:56 ripple through the system and have a uh you know a real effect a useful effect i mean i think like maybe maybe self-organized criticality can help to inform us the concept of 01:44:10 self-organized criticality can help to inform us of what do we want from democracy or a decision-making process right you know that just makes me think about different like landslides 01:44:22 and that's something that criticality theory and catastrophe theory has been used to study and instead of cascading failure we can think about like cascading neighborhood cleanups so a bunch of people just say 01:44:34 today just for an hour i feel like doing a little cleanup and all of a sudden one person puts up the flag and then it's cascading locally in some just you know unspecified way but all of a sudden you're getting this this distribution with a ton of small 01:44:48 little meetups and then several really large sweeping changes but the total number of people cleaning up is higher because you offered the affordance and the ability for the affordance to sort of propagate 01:44:59 that's right that's right we're talking about a propagation of of a propagation of information a propagation of action and the possibility that even uh you know just one or a few individuals could start a 01:45:12 little chain chain reaction that actually does affect in a positive way society now it's a little too it's almost too bad that sand piles were the original uh you know topic of 01:45:23 of this of self-organized criticality because as you point out it's not really about things falling apart it's about it's about if you think of again if you think of a complex system as a system more capable of solving more 01:45:37 challenging problems then more often you can think of self-organized criticality as a way to propagate information when it is really needed when the system needs to change 01:45:51 uh then information is you know it ingests information from its world from its senses and can act accordingly we we just um submitted an abstract with criticality and active inference and one 01:46:04 of the points was actually the existence of self-organized criticality implies a far from equilibrium system that's actively pumping energy in that's because it's a passive system that's not 01:46:15 locked and loaded

The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years.

The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago. "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region -- early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles -- an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

Dr. Ben-Dor: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance." Prof. Barkai concludes: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created -- from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size -- improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

A new study tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

We did not find strong evidence to suggest that climate, climatic fluctuations, rainfall, or vegetation over the last 1.5 million years, influenced the size of animals hunted and consumed by humans. Rather, mean body size declined linearly on a backdrop of multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. New human lineages subsisted on smaller prey than their predecessors and used more advanced tools to cope with hunting smaller prey. We suggest that hominins were likely the leading cause of Pleistocene

Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac

Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion. But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information. Accelerating into a wall? The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.” If We Can’t Stop Hothouse Earth, We’d Better Learn to Live on It read more Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.” This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.

Can Humanity Get Out of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’? A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’

Non-uniform tropical forest responses to the ‘Columbian Exchange’ in the Neotropics and Asia-Pacific

Within a cage of fixed boundaries

i talked to todd rose about this notion of collective 00:00:51 illusions you know humans are a tribal species prone to conformity and in a lot of instances we act according to what our in-group wants rather than what we want as individuals ironically todd's research shows that we make poor 00:01:04 inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities relationships values and society to avoid falling into conformity traps todd encourages us to 00:01:17 live congruent private and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions

European farmland could be biggest global reservoir of microplastics, study suggests

Sewage sludge is commonly used on agricultural land as a sustainable and renewable source of fertiliser throughout European countries, in part due to EU directives that promote the diverting of sewage sludge away from landfill and incineration and towards energy production and agriculture.

“Our results highlight the magnitude of the problem across European soils and suggest that the practice of spreading sludge on agricultural land could potentially make them one of the largest global reservoirs of microplastic pollution,”

the team estimate that microplastics removed from raw sewage at wastewater treatment plants go on to make up roughly 1% of the weight of sewage sludge, which is commonly used as a fertiliser on farms across Europe.

A stretch target set for the second half of the twenty-first century is for it to be a time in which humanity has gained knowledge, experience, and confidence in dealing with an entangled security environment and coexisting with the hyperthreat. The collective global effort and learning during phases 1–4 will have allowed ingenious solutions for interdependence to emerge. It will be a time of flourishing invention and inspiration.

the war in Ukraine now, it’s not a natural disaster. It’s a man-made disaster, and a single man. It's not the Russian people who want this war. There's really just a single person who, by his decisions, created this tragedy.

I have heard that Oracle's cloud has a free tier that even includes your own virtual private servers, so I may look into that eventually. Planning to use Oracle is something I never thought I'd be doing as a hobbyist, but these are interesting times.

These corporate “solutions” end up driving more poverty. Whereas farmers previously relied on their own locally-adapted seeds and natural fertilizers, they are forced to continuously purchase inputs from agribusiness corporations. The expensive chemicals needed to grow these “improved” seeds deplete the soil. As a result, they have to purchase more and more chemicals over time to compensate for the degradation. This is not development — it’s a vicious cycle that grows corporate profits by trapping farmers in debt.

This is the other huge important theme, which is that technology alone does not lead to a better world. It can only lead to a better world in the context of good moral and social systems. One thing that I do deeply believe is that our scientific and material technology has raced ahead of our moral and social technology. We need some catch-up growth in moral and social technology.