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This Friday. The 12th of Feb. 10am.
This zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8910289409?pwd=aWVJSUdCcjVLdDhaeWx3WkFkS0lyUT09
February 09, 2021 | Permalink
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future back in November. Still thinking about it now. These are the bits I highlighted:
"Do you know Fourier, Charles Fourier, the French utopian? No, Mary said. Tell me. He was a utopian, he had followers in France and America, they started communes based on his ideas, and in his books he went into great detail about everything. Verne loved his work, he’s a kind of secret influence on Verne. And for him the animals were very important—they were going to join us, he said, and become a big part of civilization. So at one point he says, The mail will be delivered by lions. By lions! Mary exclaimed. That’s right. The mail will be delivered by lions!"
Not a lot of significance to that. I just like the idea of the mail being delivered by lions.
"State-owned enterprises using a lot of big data and Red Plenty algorithms became less lumbering than they had been, avoiding the old bad inefficiencies, while keeping the good inefficiencies in ways that were important for resilience and justice."
'Good inefficiencies for resilience and justice' is a good thought.
"Over all of it, in the most literal sense because of the banner, and the air itself, the immense flux of information was often summed up well by what was being called the Big Index or the Big Number, meaning the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. This had now dropped 27 parts per million in the previous five years. It was down to 451 now, same as in the year 2032, and it was on a clear path to drop further, maybe even all the way to 350, the pre-industrial high point on the 280–350 ppm sine wave that had existed for the previous million years, marking shifts in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun."
I don't think we have this yet; the Big Number. It's hard to know what to promote or grasp. Temperature? Temperature change? Rate of temperature change? Parts per million. Something else.
"The 58th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories, which included the sixth mandated global stocktake, concluded with a special supplementary two-day summing up of the previous decade and indeed the entire period of the Agreement’s existence, which was looking more and more like a break point in the history of both humans and the Earth itself, the start of something new. Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene."
I love this thought. The importance of Paris and the fact that it's already happened.
"...blooming buzzing confusion..."
I've come across this a lot in the last few months, for some reason. It's William James apparently.
"Everyone knows everything. The invisible hand never picks up the check. The money is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Which is to say properly distributed."
Had never thought about the lack of justice in the William Gibson original.
"The Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones."
That's going to be a film. If it's not already.
These bits aren't especially representative of the book. Just things that struck me. I thought it was great. Both terrifying and optimistic. Is very plausible about how geo-engineering will happen, and terrorism. And encouraging about central banking. Not a phrase I thought I'd ever type.
February 01, 2021 | Permalink
