Don't Look Up

Spaceship Earth by AI

Speaking of ethnicities and culture wars (aren't all wars about cultures, or between them?), one reason Star Wars fans might be taking out their frustration on Papa Disney is escapism just isn't working across the board. We're in the middle of a hot war between superpowers and the message "don't look up" is ringing hollow. The billionaires are already moving into their luxury apartment bomb shelters.

Mad Max (Furiosa) didn't attract big audiences either. I saw it. A well made film, for what it was, but what it was, was too close for comfort. Showing a post-apocalyptic idiocracy on the big screen is somewhat triggering, not conducive to escapism. 

Dune 2, on the other hand, was in a convincingly different alt universe, and that's what we need, if seeking anti-realism.

As of this writing, the Pentagon, circuitry controlled by outsiders, is busy using high powered weapons to strike inside Russia, with no permission or understanding from the American people. 

The calmness in the streets has to do with their not really following the action. It might also have to do with countervailing media, which throw ice water on the whole business, playing up the war game escapism currently underway and offering a more credible, less dystopian, world game instead.

The stridently arrogant of this world want to plunge us into conflagrations. The result is not surprising: the circuitry is rewiring to lock out the outsiders, if possible, to disconnect them from their arsenals, to which their continued access is now unauthorized. 

When people believing themselves to be insiders wake up to their actual NPC status, that'll be a good day. In the meantime, we're being victimized by morons.

Emerging Ethnicities

My vision of the world rallying to the needs of the besieged in Gaza and setting up an evacuation flotilla was counter what borders are all about: restricting freedom of movement, penning people in, subjecting them to the authority of whomever happens to be exercising jurisdiction over whatever region they happen to be trapped in.

In the SimU game, campuses dot the globe and students, faculty, admins flit about more freely, engaged in work-study. The question "where are you from?" is considered fairly bogus, unless it means "where were you born?". Obviously we're all from Planet Earth and each of us wanders its surface to some degree.

I wouldn't expect any top down "world government" to take care of these movements. Migration patterns are not always subject to tight regulation by bureaucracies. On the other hand, campuses with liberal intake policies may nevertheless be able to track enrollees. I'm able to write science fiction about it all, drawing from existing patterns.

You'll find people deliberately confusing "genocide" with "ethnic cleansing" all the time, because they don't want to think too hard. Nor is ethnicity a static attribute. If your ethnic group has been bombed or otherwise attacked by another one, that tends to change your ethnicity. 

You may now have a permanent grudge, an ax to grind, that you didn't have before. Or perhaps your ethnicity is about not carrying grudges. Your discipline is about working through negative emotions and finding ways to transform them. A lot depends on what anchoring religions and/or metaphysical disciplines you want governing your life, which preferences change with time, as possibilities are revealed.

I still envision mixed-use skyscrapers and other buildings, some of which identify as New Palestine University (NPU) or simply Palestine, but it's more a corporate logo than a national flag, in the sense that no contiguous boundary around a large geographical region is presumed. Diaspora nations (the best kind) dot the world with assets. 

Contiguous boundaries have mostly been replaced with credentials and access to specific goods and services, specific facilities, such as on a US military base in the Philippines, and/or through a university.

Am I saying I'm a practitioner of "zionetics" or one of those, meaning I'm eager to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians?  No. All these ethnicities are already globally distributed. I don't have to lift a finger. 

Let Palestinians come and go as they please, via Palestinian Airlines or whatever. But with an early emphasis on "go" i.e. to get away from toxic neighbors. Return when the neighborhood improves? It's up to individuals, unless they break too many rules. Banishment remains a practice.

I'm free, as an American, to laugh at the Louisiana Purchase as the science fiction it was and is. I'm free to make light of ethnicities that take the idea of nation states so uber seriously, or that believe in "races" at the cost of sacrificing an ability to think globally. I don't have to brainwash myself the same way they do, nor am I compelled to respect their choices, as many Jews and/or Christians and/or Muslims etc. likewise do not.

My ethnicity also doesn't feel compelled to always agree that "space is 3D" even if we're well-versed in that metaphysics. We have our own namespaces. That's in part how we bond. Given telecommunications, we don't feel compelled to all move to the same base in Arizona or Utah or whatever. We might build a school in Gaza, perhaps near to a McDonald's or a Vkusno i Tochka, the way schools are in Oregon (next to fast food joints).

Journaling Freely

One would imagine a city of screenwriters like LA could work backwards from our wanting that mixed use floor space in office towers yesterday. Does that mean remodeling every floor into apartments? Does it mean hauling a sleeping bag to your office? How about a cot?  Where does a family find its privacy barriers?

The Zoom revolution helped, and was coming with or without covid, but yes, the sars2 virus helped catalyze killing the commute for many a "cube farmer", planners know this.

What's needed are high functioning managers who know how to work with others from the inside out, as resident advisers. We used to call them community organizers, but the stereotypes there exclude most business sector talent. 

What holds these groups together is less a religion and more an economics theory, such as GST, which is personal workspace centric and conversant with "global university" networking.  Such "faculty" will be among the first "boots on the ground" in the back rooms or liminal spaces of virtual community formation. 

Not everyone is cut out for such work, to state the obvious, and when it comes to drug rehab, lets admit that outdoor settings are oft preferred. 

Getting penned up with people undergoing withdrawal is impractical. This isn't prison we're talking about.

Deke the Geek has been studying UIs forever, so you might think we'd have the knowledge engineering dashboards by now, but he's not sufficiently integrated within campus circuitry / security. 

The programming curriculum is a joke, I say as an insider, because it's starving the right brain, even if you don't believe right brains might be starved, or what the consequences might be for doing so. Nevertheless, the hegemony of the lexical lefties is sometimes palpably oppressive. 

We need more of a movie industry around all the good stuff happening in human services, made by the humans served.

For readers just joining us, you won't have the context of QuarterWorld style gamification floors where we experiment with those alternative curricula y'all have been sending us, at least in idea form. I'd get first dibs at the trough sometimes, meaning I'd be one of the first to promote it if I thought it worthy. 

Who knows what the world might have been like, had Strange Attractors seen the light of day (a toy I worked on, and which got as far as a shrink wrapped box).

Deke would still need to drive around and recruit for these shelters, by which I mean these former office towers downtown, some of which have suitable facilities for these different levels of refugee. We have the local clientele, and we have the more globally routed. 

Portland has long served as a refugee resettlement business, with my place of employment (CUE) providing some of the framework. A lot of my Palestinian connections trace to that chapter, adding to my already robust ties to the Jewish community, although I admit to not knowing many Israelis (I've not visited since the 1970s, and by now it's a different country they tell me).

Portland needs to experiment with various levels of world livingry service industry logistical assistance, as I've been brainstorming as a kind of "outdoor Ikea" around the Port Authority somewhere, I thought Dignity Village might be eager to branch out. 

NGOs and prototyping go together. I called it Project Renaissance, but NATO took things in a different direction. I chalk that up to cultural illiteracy. 

Some people in government have less than a high school level education, when you factor in what [real] high school looks like in the 2020s. Adults need it badly, as much or more than the teens. 

Boomers who didn't get lucky with Bucky the first time (almost all of them) deserve another crack at the synergetic singularity, a boat they've hitherto missed, no thanks to the hypercross dogmatists.