New Post at the Dragonfly

Beth Holloway before a photo of her missing daughter, Natalee. Image Source: Rolling Stone.

I have a new post up at my other blog, The Dragonfly. You can read it here.

Away from Blog

I will be away from the blog due to unexpected circumstances and will return as soon as possible. The Quadriga post will be updated at that time; see this recent report on QuadrigaCX from the Globe and Mail.

A Note to My Subscribers: Google Plus is Shutting Down

Image Source: BAKDigital.

Launched in 2011, Google+, is shutting down on 2 April 2019. If you follow this blog on my Google+ pages here and here, please subscribe now to my Blogger subscription list here. You can also receive e-mail updates on each new post by entering your e-mail in the 'subscribe' box in the side margin of this blog.

Please also join my mailing list in the footer of my main Website, here. Scroll to the very bottom of the page.

The mailing list is not yet activated so I won't be annoying you with e-mails, but if Google censors Blogger more than it is already doing, I will transfer my blogs to another platform. The mailing list will be the only way I can reach subscribers to provide new Website addresses. I will also use the mailing list to notify subscribers about upcoming projects and publications.

Image Source: Prepare for Change.

Google+ will be deleted because the platform exposed the data of 500,000 users between 2015 and March 2018. Google discovered the vulnerability but did not disclose it because its executives feared regulatory scrutiny about their data collection methods. They finally acknowledged the problem publicly on 8 October 2018. See Google's FAQ here, a report here, and discussion here.

RIP Google+ https://t.co/HYGHepa8Xq

— CNET (@CNET) October 8, 2018

The Revolution of Politics and Magic

Image Source: Kate's Clothing.

A new post up at my writer's blog, The Dragonfly, describes how I developed one of my fictional characters, a French psychiatrist who treats world leaders: Rémy Balthazar.

The post draws from articles I've written on this blog about the Millennial paranoia that modern politics was never based on rationalism. Rather, it was founded on the worship of rationalism, which is a different matter. If kings ruled by divine right and combined politics with religion, the modern era has depended instead on merging politics with magic.

Balthazar is an enigmatic character defined by the questions which are still raised by that revolutionary formula. Nominally secularist, atheistic and rationalistic, that model shrouds our daily lives in mystery and a yearning to know the whole truth.

Going Off Script

The Buddhist Karma wheel. Image Source: Notefolio.

This year, I am participating in National Novel Writing Month, not to write a novel, but to clear out several projects in a thirty-day writing marathon. I will be reflecting on this process in November at my writer's blog, The Dragonfly, where I have a new post up today on how going off script and breaking your social conditioning helps heal karma.

BEST KARMA CLEANSING FOR BAD KARMA EFFECTS : KARMA SHANTI MANTRA : VERY VERY POWERFUL ! (4 November 2015). Video Source: Youtube.

Away from Blog

Tsuchiya Hikarii . pic.twitter.com/csxW0Mgn77

— Mordecai (@MenschOhneMusil) October 3, 2017

Today is the blog's eighth birthday! Here is the first post. I will update the best posts list shortly.

To celebrate, I am going on summer vacation until 8 August 2018. In the interim, I may publish occasional posts at my other blogs. On return, I will continue commenting on the current topic of artificial intelligence and global security.

Losing Our Addiction

Mark Zuckerberg in 2009: Facebook privacy is central - BBC News (21 March 2018). Video Source: Youtube.

The endgame of social media is becoming clear. The exciting 2000s and early 2010s were the heyday of the Creative Commons. A beautiful ideal established in 2001, the Creative Commons refers to the free-sharing of information, the democratization of data.

The Commons made way for cyber-variants of political ideologies, which attempted to describe and defend new virtual freedoms. Social media seemed to offer soapboxes and development venues for tech-savvy individuals. Some of these individuals became hacktivists and citizen journalists, who used search engines and video platforms like Youtube to expose the power structures of the world. They fell for the tempting promise that the little person could finally be empowered, independent, and free. Having identified themselves in the system as potential leaders, they are now being censored. Each new liberty in this testing ground has led social media users ever deeper into a matrix of control.

It is evident that early Millennial spaces of free discussion, sexual libertinism, and politically liberated behaviour, alongside honeypot offers of cheap hardware and open source toolkits, were always controlled environments. Think of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google and even the chans! - as Petri dishes and you start to get a better idea of what has been happening. As I stated in an earlier post about the Dark Web, anonymity is a myth. These free spaces were merely opportunities to gather vast amounts of human data for future AI systems, dedicated to social control and surveillance.

"Sean Parker, 38, claims social media sites like Facebook are 'exploiting vulnerabilities in human psychology' and said social media pioneers like himself 'understood this consciously and we did it anyway.'": Facebook founder warns of social media addiction (10 November 2017). Video Source: Youtube/ABC News.

Last year, VICE talked to Google ex-designer and ethicist Tristan Harris. Harris confirmed that social media platforms were deliberately designed to addict their users and employed tricks used in casinos, such as intermittent variable rewards. Social media platforms use social reciprocity, social approval, fear of missing out, and fear of social exclusion to trick users into sharing their personal data and their emotional sensibilities around that data. It's all done in a climate of fake positivity, driven by an undercurrent of addiction, social threat, and fear.

Social media platforms also employ principles of deception because they only offer users certain courses of behaviour, with few considering the choices which were not made available. You can read Harris's essays on this topic here.

Dopamine, an "AI platform" to engineer addictiveness. Saddest thing I've read about today. If you work in AI, you have de facto some power over others, so remember to always exercise this power responsibly. https://t.co/tcT7t1QETc

— François Chollet (@fchollet) November 8, 2017

Facebook's ex-president Sean Parker confirmed the founding principles of the platform in a series of interviews last year; from Slate:

"The thought process was all about, 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?', he said. 'And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.'"

Parker's revelations mean that in the 2009 interview at the top of this post, Mark Zuckerberg was outright lying to the BBC about Facebook's endgame. Today's Silicon Valley marketing is reminiscent of cigarette ads from the 1950s through the 1980s, which deliberately misled consumers about the terrible health effects of smoking.

When Death Confronts You

The mummified corpse of one of Sir John Franklin's men from the ill-fated 1845 Arctic expedition. Image Source: pinterest.

There is a new post up on my other blog, The Dragonfly (here), which describes my work on the 1845 Franklin expedition. Ridley Scott has produced a new television series on the same subject, which plays on the explorers' horror as they confronted death in an endless, barren wilderness. The show premieres on 26 March 2018.

New Territories

I am pleased today to announce the launch of my writer's Website, https://www.lcdouglass.com, and the companion blog about writing and media, The Dragonfly. The opening post is here.

On The Dragonfly, I will introduce myself and describe my background, after years of writing under a pen name. This includes the story of how I came to write Histories of Things to Come.

To expand HOTTC's original aim to tell a 'real time history' of the turn of the Millennium, I will develop more substantial research and vlogging projects, and take a snapshot of our world today. How are we sitting in relation to our history? How is technology affecting the remnants of the past?

These new Websites and social media pages will be part of book publications and the development of new projects.

Awaken the Amnesiacs 10: The World of Machines and the Retired Engineer

Image from 2017's Cicada3301 rabbit hole, an online/real world code-breaking scavenger hunt. Some people believe that the Cicada online games are recruitment puzzles for an unknown organization. Image Source: Youtube.

This blog is named for a phrase written by Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) in his secret journals. In Yahuda MS 1.1, folio 16 recto, Newton wrote: "the holy Prophecies" of the Scripture are nothing else than "histories of things to come." He was using magic and religion to predict the future and the end of the world. The exact passage in his Untitled Treatise on Revelation (held at the National Library of Israel in the Yahuda manuscripts collection, as cited above; you can see the actual document here) reads:

Rules for interpreting the Apocalyps.

"12. The Construction of the Apocalyps after it is once deter {16r} mined must be made the rule of interpretations; And all interpretations rejected which agree not with it. That must not be strained to fit history but such things chosen out of history as are most suitable to that.

13. To interpret sacred Prophecies of the most considerable things & actions of those times to which they are applied. For if it would be weakness in an Historian whilst he writes of obscurer actions to let slip the greater, much less ought this to be supposed in the holy Prophesies which are no other then histories of things to come.

14. To proportion the most notable parts of Prophesy to the most notable parts of history, & the breaches made in a continued series of Prophesy to the changes made in history And to reject those interpretations where the parts and breaches of Prophesy do not thus bear a due proportion to the parts & changes in History. For if Historians divide their histories into Sections Chapters & Books at such periods of time where the less, greater & greatest revolutions begin or end; & to do otherwise would be improper: much more ought we to suppose that the holy Ghost observes this rule accurately in his prophetick dictates, since they are no other then histories of things to come. Thus by the great breaches made between the sixt & seventh seal by interposing the vision of the sealed saints, & between the sixt & seventh Trumpet by interposing the vision of the little book, that prophesy is divided into three cardinal parts, & the middle part subdivided by the little breach between the fourth & fift Trumpet made by interposition of the Angel crying Wo, & all the other seals & trumpets are as it were less sections. And therefore to these breaches & sections, according to the rule, must be adapted periods of time which intercede & disterminate proportional revolutions of history. Again if a Historian should use no proportion in his descriptions but magnify a less thing above a greater or attribute the more courage to the softer of two persons &c.: we {17r} should count it an argument of his unskilfulness. And therefore since the dictates of the Holy-Ghost are histories of things to come, such disproportions are not to be allowed in them. Thus in Daniel's vision of the four Beasts, it would be grosly absurd to interpret, as some Polititians of late have done, the fourth Beast of Antiochus Epiphanes & his successors; since that is described to be the most terrible, dreadfull, strong, & warlike Beast of all the four, & the Prophet dwels far longer upon the description of that then of all the others put together: whereas the kingdom of Antiochus Epiphanes & his successors was both less & weaker & less warlike then any of the three before him.

15. To chose those interpretations which without straining do most respect the church & argue the greatest wisdom & providence of God for preserving her in the truth. As he that would interpret the letters or actions of a very wise states man, so as thence to know the council wherewith they are guided & the designes he is driving on, must consider the main end to which they are directed & suppose they are such as most conduce to that end & argue the greatest wisdom & providence of the States-man in ordering them: so it is in these Prophesies. They are the counsels of God & so the most wise, & fittest for the end to which they are designed: And that end is the benefit of the Church to guide her & preserve her in the truth. For to this end are all the sacred prophesies in both the old and new Testament directed, as they that will consider them may easily perceive. Hence may appear the oversight of some interpreters whose interpretations if they were true would make the Apocalyps of little or no concernment to the Church. Perhaps what follows may be better inserted in the preface.

Yet I meane not that these Prophesies were intended to convert the whole world to the truth. For God is just as well as merciful, & punishes wickednes by hardening the wicked & {18r} visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children. But the designe of them is to try men & convert the best, so that the church may be purer & less mixed with Hypocrites & luke-warm persons. And for this end it is that they are wrapt up in obscurity, & so framed by the wisdom of God that the inconsiderate, the proud, the self-conceited, the presumptuous, the scholist, the sceptic, they whose judgments are ruled by their lusts, their interest, the fashions of the world, their esteem of men, the outward shew of thing or other prejudices, & all they who, of how pregnant natural parts soever they be, yet cannot discern the wisdom of God in the contrivance of the creation: that these men whose hearts are thus hardned in seeing should see & not perceive & in hearing should heare & not understand. For God has declared his intention in these prophesies to be as well that none of the wicked should understand as that the wise should understand, Dan: 12.

And hence I cannot but on this occasion reprove the blindness of a sort of men who although they have neither better nor other grounds for their faith then the Scribes & Pharisees had for their Traditions, yet are so pervers as to call upon other men for such a demonstration of the certainty of faith in the scriptures that a meer naturall man, how wicked soever, who will but read it, may judg of it & perceive the strength of it with as much perspicuity & certainty as he can a demonstration in Euclide. Are not these men like the Scribes & Pharisees who would not attend to the law & the Prophets but required a signe of Christ? Wherefore if Christ thought it just to deny a signe to that wicked & adulterate generation notwithstanding that they were God's own people, & the Catholique Church; much more may God think it just that this generation {19r} should be permitted to dy in their sins, who do not onely like the Scribes neglect but trample upon the law and the Prophets, & endeavour by all possible means to destroy the faith which men have in them, & to make them disregarded. I could wish they would consider how contrary it is to God's purpose that the truth of his religion should be as obvious & perspicuous to all men as a mathematical demonstration. Tis enough that it is able to move the assent of those which he hath chosen; & for the rest who are so incredulous, it is just that they should be permitted to dy in their sins. Here then is the wisdom of God, that he hath so framed the Scriptures as to discern between the good and the bad, that they should be demonstration to the one & foolishness to the other.

And from this consideration may also appear the vanity of those men who regard the splendor of churches & measure them by the external form & constitution. Whereas it is more agreable to God's designe that his church appear contemptible & scandalous to the world to try men. For this end doubtles he suffered the many revoltings of the Iewish Church under the Law, & for the same end was the grand Apostacy to happen under the gospel. Rev . If thou relyest upon the externall form of churches, the Learning of Scholars, the wisdom of statemen or of other men of Education; consider with thy self whither thou wouldest not have adhered to the scribes & Pharisees hadst thou lived in their days, & if this be thy case, then is it no better then theirs, & God may judg thee accordingly, unless thou chance to be on the right side, which as tis great odds may prove otherwise so if it should happen yet it would scarce excuse thy folly although it might something mitigate it.{/19r}{/18r}{/17r}{/16r}"

Newton's occult papers, some of which are now published online, were kept hidden for centuries. When these mysterious diaries resurfaced, about half of them were purchased in 1936 by the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946); another large portion was collected by Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951). You can read details about the 1936 Sotheby's auction of Newton's 'Portsmouth Papers' here and here.

Isaac Newton, Untitled Treatise on Revelation, Yahuda MS 1.1, folio 16 recto (National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel). Published online June 2004. Click to enlarge.

It was Keynes who said that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason ... . He was the last of the magicians.” Keynes lectured on Newton in 1942 and 1943, waiting until the very end of his life to reveal this secret dimension of Newton's work. Prior to that, it was not public knowledge at all. The full text of Keynes's 1946 essay on 'Newton, the Man,' is here.

"much more ought we to suppose that the holy Ghost observes this rule accurately in his prophetick dictates, since they are no other then histories of things to come": Isaac Newton, Untitled Treatise on Revelation, Yahuda MS 1.1, folio 16 recto (National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel). Published online June 2004. Click to enlarge.

Thus, the title suits this blog, which considers present trends in terms of their potential historical significance and imagines their future consequences. However, this blog also has that name to ask its readers to reconsider ideas they take for granted.

The reason we are discussing Newton now is because his papers were kept hidden and not brought to public light at all until the 1990s. They weren't disseminated online until the 2000s. That is a long time for a central piece of information about the Scientific Revolution to be missing. Newton's private papers tell us how he arrived at his scientific breakthroughs, his methods, and his intentions.

Newton's occult works mean, plain as day, that the Scientific Revolution is not, and never was, what we were told it was. On the surface, Enlightenment principles of secularism and rationalism rejected God and mystical and religious ideas as fairy tales. Religion offered an infantile grasp of the world, beyond which we have matured and evolved.

This would be convincing if secularism and rationalism did not bear all the operational marks of a heretical cult, complete with a hard little esoteric nut at the centre, available only to the initiated. The supreme irony that the cult declares itself the ultimate-anti-cult does not make it any less cultish.

In the cult-like anti-cult atmosphere, anomalies sit out in the open and provoke occasional confusion before the rationalist mantras seal everything back up.

Why was the father of modern science also an alchemist and magician? The occult writings are explained away: Newton was an extremely intelligent, curious individual and he lived in times when religion and superstition had not been completely extracted from scientific thought.

Was Newton really the last of the magicians? The post-2008 economic recovery from the Great Recession was managed according to Keynesian principles. Why was Keynes, a famous thinker in modern economics, so fascinated by Newton's esoteric writings? Keynes's Newtonian occult collection is explained away: it was the economist's personal interest. Magic had and has nothing to do with Keynesian economics.

Well, look at the bottom of this post, and read the transcript from the lecture by German philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß. He describes the occult distinction between macrocosm and microcosm, with its famous magical spell 'as above so below.' Ask yourself if that sounds anything like the distinction between macroeconomics and microeconomics.

Blog Book Holiday Giveaway

Image Source: Humans are Free.

BOOK GIVEAWAY EXTENDED TO 29 NOVEMBER 2017.

Today, I am sending out a HUGE thank you to my readers for sticking with this blog since 2010! It's been seven long years. I know how much noise and information there is on the Internet, and I am so grateful to everyone who has stopped here and helped build Histories of Things to Come to 3 million total hits this October.

Writing this blog has been hugely rewarding for me, and I appreciate all the readers who have lurked, commented, donated, and written to me privately. Thank you! To celebrate, I am offering a holiday book giveaway to my readers.

I was going to run this giveaway in December, but after checking the mail service, I'm running it now so that winners receive the books in time for the holidays.

How it Works

Over the next two weeks, from 8 November 2017 (starting 12:00 a.m. UTC) to 29 November 2017 (ending 23:59 p.m. UTC), if you want any of the books listed below, please send me a note in my 'Contact Me' message box in the right hand margin.

In the message, provide your email address and which books you want. If you want more than one book, list which ones in order of your preference (yes, you can list all of them). I won't acknowledge receipt of messages because of time limits but rest assured, the contract form is reliable. Don't leave your request in the comments box below.

For each book, I will put all related emails in a hat and choose one email. If your email gets picked more than once, I'll pick your top choice of book and redraw so someone else gets the other books.

Once I've drawn the winners, I'll email the winners personally and ask for their names and addresses and will mail the book directly to them. In the case of Scott Bembenek's work, I'll pass on the winner's information and his publicist will mail the book directly.

I'll also announce when the winners are chosen on the blog, so you will know if you didn't win.

Privacy: I won't share your e-mail or private information with anyone else. Please indicate when you contact me whether you want your e-mail to be included on my mailing list or not.

The Books

Sorry that these are only books in English - maybe next time I can find non-English publishers who wish to share copies.

• THE COSMIC MACHINE: Scott Bembenek, The Cosmic Machine: The Science that Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It (San Diego: Zoari, 2017).

This is the Amazon #1 Best Seller in Chemical Physics and Quantum Chemistry. I will be featuring an interview with Dr. Bembenek about his book in December on this blog.

ENERGY, ENTROPY, ATOMS, AND QUANTUM MECHANICS form the very foundation of our universe. But how do they govern the world we live in? What was the difficult path to their discovery? Who were the key players that struggled to shape our current understanding?

The Cosmic Machine takes you from the earliest scientific inquiries in human history on an exciting journey in search of the answers to these questions. In telling this fascinating story of science, the author Scott Bembenek masterfully guides you through the wonderment of how scientific discoveries (and the key players of those discoveries) shaped the world as we know it today.

With its unique blend of science, history, and biographies, The Cosmic Machine provides an easily accessible account without sacrificing the actual science itself. Not only will this book engage, enlighten, and entertain you, it will inspire your passion and curiosity for the world around us.

[From Zoari Press:] Paperback: 358 pages

Publisher: Zoari Press; First edition (August 15, 2017)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0997934107

ISBN-13: 978-0997934106

• OURS TO HACK AND TO OWN: Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, eds., Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (NY: OR Books, 2016).

Real democracy and the Internet are not mutually exclusive. Here, for the first time in one volume, are some of the most cogent thinkers and doers on the subject of the cooptation of the Internet, and how we can resist and reverse the process. The activists who have put together Ours to Hack and to Own argue for a new kind of online economy: platform cooperativism, which combines the rich heritage of cooperatives with the promise of 21st-century technologies, free from monopoly, exploitation, and surveillance.

The on-demand economy is reversing the rights and protections workers fought for centuries to win. Ordinary Internet users, meanwhile, retain little control over their personal data. While promising to be the great equalizers, online platforms have often exacerbated social inequalities. Can the Internet be owned and governed differently? What if Uber drivers set up their own platform, or if a city’s residents controlled their own version of Airbnb? This book shows that another kind of Internet is possible—and that, in a new generation of online platforms, it is already taking shape.

Included in this volume are contributions from Michel Bauwens, Yochai Benkler, Francesca Bria, Susie Cagle, Miriam Cherry, Ra Criscitiello, John Duda, Marina Gorbis, Karen Gregory, Seda Gürses, Steven Hill, Dmytri Kleiner, Vasilis Kostakis, Brendan Martin, Micky Metts, Kristy Milland, Mayo Fuster Morell, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Rachel O’Dwyer, Janelle Orsi, Michael Peck, Carmen Rojas, Douglas Rushkoff, Saskia Sassen, Juliet Schor, Palak Shah, Tom Slee, Danny Spitzberg, Arun Sundararajan, Astra Taylor, Cameron Tonkinwise, McKenzie Wark, and Caroline Woolard.

Publication January 12, 2017 • 252 pages

Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-62-3 • E-book 978-1-682190-63-0

• BEAUTIFUL RISING: Juman Abujbara, Andrew Boyd, Dave Mitchell, and Marcel Taminato, eds., Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South (NY: OR Books, 2017).

In the struggle for freedom and justice, organizers and activists have often turned to art, creativity, and humor. In this follow-up to the bestselling Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, Beautiful Rising showcases some of the most innovative tactics used in struggles against autocracy and austerity across the Global South.

Based on face-to-face jam sessions held in Yangon, Amman, Harare, Dhaka, Kampala and Oaxaca, Beautiful Rising includes stories of the Ugandan organizers who smuggled two yellow-painted pigs into parliament to protest corruption; the Burmese students’ 360-mile long march against undemocratic and overly centralized education reforms; the Lebanese “honk at parliament” campaign against politicians who had clung to power long after their term had expired; and much more.

Now, in one remarkable book, you can find the collective wisdom of more than a hundred grassroots organizers from five continents. It’s everything you need for a DIY uprising of your own.

272 pages • Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs

Paperback ISBN 978-1-682191-12-5 • E-book 978-1-682191-13-2

• WHEN GOOGLE MET WIKILEAKS: Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (NY: OR Books, 2014).

In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest.

For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network—from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently.

When Google Met WikiLeaks presents the story of Assange and Schmidt’s encounter. Both fascinating and alarming, it contains an edited transcript of their conversation and extensive, new material, written by Assange specifically for this book, providing the best available summary of his vision for the future of the Internet.

Publication September 18, 2014 • 223 pages

Paperback ISBN 978-1-939293-57-2 • E-book ISBN 978-1-939293-58-9

Book review: "When Google Met WikiLeaks - "clearest indication yet that the Internet has been militarized" http://t.co/aNitAM5xiK

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 6, 2014

• JERUSALEM: Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London: Knockabout, 2016).

Alan Moore says of his work:

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.

Disappeared lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church-front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath towards the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.

“The endgame of epic modernism. There is nothing quite like this book in scale and bustling frenzy. Gamble everything. Read Jerusalem and you’ll never emerge in the same place.” – Iain Sinclair

1200 pages 3 paperbacks in slipcase | ISBN isbn 9780861662548

Additional Thanks:

I want to thank Katie Schnack at Smith Publicity and Emma at OR Books. OR Books publishes the top names in digital dissidence and cutting-edge analyses of the social, political, and philosophical impacts of technological innovation.

A Big Blog Thank You

S. Manon's photo of New York City's Central Park on a foggy fall night (2 October 2012). Image Source: Wiki.

This blog just passed 3 million hits! Thank you very much to everyone who has spent precious time here reading these posts. I am extremely grateful to all my readers. There will be a giveaway in November to thank readers who have helped the blog to pass this milestone.

Central Park on a foggy night. Image Source: Favim.

Away from Blog

Maxfield Parrish. pic.twitter.com/VlEi96hLOQ

— Mordecai (@MenschOhneMusil) June 11, 2017

I will be away from the blog on summer vacation until 10 September 2017.

Millennial Extremes 13: Reach the Summit of Summits

On 25 May 2014, Sandhana Palli Anand Kumar became the first Dalit (India's lowest social caste, the 'untouchables') to scale Mount Everest. He accompanied Malavath Poorna, then aged 13, the youngest girl ever to climb the mountain. Image Source: Youtube.

The blog started this year in the Himalayas, and returns there as we just passed the year's half-way point on 1 July 2017. This day, 23 July 2017 (9:45 UTC), is also a new moon in Leo, which if you believe in astrology, marks a huge shift in everyone's lives.

After 18 months of slogging, the astrologers declare a big door has opened, and the period from today through to the 21 August 2017 solar eclipse is symbolically the end of past difficulties and the start of the story of why you were born to live on this planet, no matter how old you are. One astrologer worked himself up into hysterics and yelled: "It's going to be a wild ride. ... Stop thinking about the world. ... Don't f**k this one up!! ... You rarely get opportunities like this!"

However, one must act under guidance of the heart, against mass conformity and reject preconceived ideas of the way things should be (south node in Aquarius). Dark Star Astrology calls it "tribal shock"; one must act as an authentic, genuine individual. There is a choice between leaders and groups, between individuals and collective social conditioning.

The last time we saw similar aspects (north node in Leo) was before the tech boom in 1998-1999, which defined the way the world came to look - but what was subsequently created was not as planned or prescribed; nor was it expected, given the way things were in the 1990s. It is a time of huge creativity, combined with uniqueness, individualism, and unpredictability.

Sandhana Palli Anand Kumar's selfie video from the summit: Amazing video from top of Mount Everest: Anand Kumar on peak (June 2014). Video Source: Youtube.

Symbolic this new moon may be, but no summit can be scaled without initial resolution and Mount Everest provides the best example.

At 8,848 metres (29,029 feet), the mountain, half in China, half in Nepal, is of course the world's tallest. It has other names: Chomolongma (in Romanized Tibetan); Sagarmatha (Romanized Nepalese); Qomolangma (Romanized Chinese). Its Old Darjeeling name is Deodungha.

Here are some new videos of people who successfully scaled this incredible peak. The most recent examples involve people who use the summit simultaneously to break social barriers, while overcoming tests of personal physical endurance and possibility. The latter have always been so. Only two people have ever scaled the mountain solo: the Italian, Reinhold Messner and the Swede, Göran Kropp (1966-2002). But today's mountaineers challenge the mountain, as well as barriers of age, gender, and social class.

After two years' preparation, Russian Valery Rozov set a record base jump off the mountain in May 2013: Mount Everest Wingsuit Jump Video: Man Jumps Off Peak With Wingsuit (May 2013). Video Source: Youtube.

Climbing Mount Everest is a deadly prospect, and there are a lot of videos about the dark side of these expeditions. The mountain is littered with tonnes of human waste and garbage and is the gravesite of unrecovered climbers' bodies. Over 290 people have died trying to climb the mountain. Nevertheless, the expeditions have continued and increased since 2000:

"With 2016 in the books, there have been 7,646 total summits by 4,469 different climbers. 1,105 climbers, mostly Sherpa, have multiple summits. The south side (Nepal) remains more popular with 4,863 summits while the north (Tibet) has 2,783 summits."

Those numbers come from The Himalayan Database. Spaniard Kilian Jornet accomplished the fastest ascent to the top in May 2017, without bottled oxygen or fixed ropes. He managed it in 26 hours. By 2012, Apa Sherpa - whose nickname is 'Super Sherpa' - had climbed the mountain 21 times.

Images Source: Alan Arnette.

Indian Girls On Top Of The World! Mt. Everest next door!! (June 2016). Video Source: Youtube.

The National Cadet Corps (NCC) of India has intenstive mountaineering programs, and on 21-22 May 2016, a team of ten female cadets, aged 17 to 21, climbed Mount Everest. Their climb is documented above; they were honoured in New Delhi on 10 June 2016, below. Then-Army Chief General Dalbir Singh declared the girls would be considered to become officers in the Indian Army.

Army chief praises girl NCC team which scaled Mt. Everest - ANI News (June 2016). Video Source: Youtube.

Blog's Seventh Birthday

From Adult Swim's Rick and Morty (2017). Image Source: New Republic.

It's hard to believe that this blog has been running for seven years! My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who spends time here. The Best Posts page has been updated, here. I would love to develop the blog's format and present new projects on the techno-cultural history of the New Millennium. Please comment below and tell me what you would like to see.

If you would like to keep this blog going and help expand it, please donate below!

Away from Blog

Untitled - Dunkerque 2014. Image © Nicolas Decoopman. (Hat tip: Dylan Cuffy.)

I will be away from the blog due to other work demands until 1 May 2017. I may publish the occasional post in that period if circumstances warrant it.

Street Reflection - Dunkerque 2016. Image Source: Google +.

For more from photographer Nicolas Decoopman, go here. All photos are copyright the artist and are reproduced here non-commercially under Fair Use.

Behind the Window #35 - Lille 2016. Image Source: Google +.

Street Reflection - Dunkerque 2015. Image Source: Google +.

Street Reflection - Dunkerque 2015. Image Source: Google +.

Untitled - Dunkerque 2015. Image © Nicolas Decoopman.

Blog's Sixth Birthday

Gopuram of a south Indian temple. Image Source: pinterest.

Today is the blog's sixth birthday! Thank you very much to everyone who has stopped here to read my posts. Over the past year, these were the most popular posts:

• Post-Apocalypse Rehab
• The New Age of William Butler Yeats
• Colour of the Year: Marsala
• You've Come a Long Way, Baby
• Forever: Maybe Not the Word You Want?
• True Detective: Time is a Flat Circle

I will be away from the blog until Bastille Day, 14 July 2016.


See this blog's Best Posts, now updated, here.

The Permanent Web 1: History, IPFS, and Ethereum

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Signet Books ed., 1954). Image Source: Flavor Wire.

This blog asks how we can record and write history in the new Millennium, given the volume of information, the ephemeral nature of the World Wide Web (evident in link rot and dead Websites), and the problem that data and authorship can be changed. There is an additional problem of interpretation of data. From my blog's statement of intention:

"This blog is an experiment in writing real-time history, which deals with the impact of digital communications on our understanding of history. There are serious problems emerging in social media, in which opinions are confused with facts, data and sources are available but potentially manipulated, and historical interpretive authority derives from hit counts and technical algorithms determining audience traffic. These problems demand an ongoing and increasingly rigorous reappraisal of historical method and historiography, to take into account the impacts of online behaviour and virtual perception."

As the Internet evolves, a disturbing trend has emerged which confirms the worst predictions of author George Orwell. The impermanent Web, as it now exists, enables manipulations of centralized information which effectively destroy history, common values, societal stability and our whole grasp of reality. With Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell understood that the stability of history, and of our ability to write verified history, depends on - and further shapes - a society's underlying structural organization, its politics, and the degree to which an individual within that system can form autonomous thoughts and emotions. Nineteen Eighty-Four's political horror hinges on a love story and asks whether love can blossom and endure against a pure, anti-historical tyranny, or whether it will be crushed as sexcrime.

Peter Cushing played Winston and Yvonne Mitchell played Julia in the 1953-1954 BBC dramatization of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Watch it here. Image Source: Speaker to Animals.

Orwell promised that the destruction of history, information impermanence and propaganda manipulation rely on and reinforce two conditions: first, psychological authoritarianism, a precondition for real world totalitarianism; and second, the centralization of information. Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, addresses his secret diary to any reader who is free from the past or future: "To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone."

If there is no correction in the current state of affairs, our impermanent Web threatens to become aggressively anti-historical and ensure frightening Orwellian outcomes. This is why open source coders, hackers and independent designers are trying to think about the Web in a new way. They want to redevelop it to create two results: first, they want to build a permanent Web, where all files and information are perpetually recorded, maintained, encrypted, public, and protected; second, they want to decentralize, and then distribute, big data power. That would allow future generations to question any information presented as historical facts. With a permanent, decentralized Web, anyone in the future will be able to check the archived data for themselves, no matter who they are, and no matter where they are.

This new possibility is appearing in the cryptocurrency and peer-to-peer technology spheres, through mergers of cryptocurrency technology with a collaborative information protocol called Interplanetary File System, also known by its acronym IPFS. (IPFS is not to be confused with Google's Interplanetary Internet Protocols, which are being designed at NASA for Mars colonization; I first blogged about InterPlaNet in 2011, here.)

I want to thank Chris Ellis for bringing IPFS to my attention. Ellis is a great, original thinker in the Bitcoin industry and founder of ProTip and the Fullnode Project. His technical and philosophical meditations on the combination of a new Web network protocol with cryptocurrencies enabled me to think of their broader implications in historical terms. You can see my 2014 interview with Ellis here; my earlier discussion on Bitcoin crowdfunding of creative and intellectual projects with Protip is here.

After talking to Ellis, I wondered if a distributed, permanent historic archive heralds as big a shift as did the historic separation of church and state. Over the past decade, the Internet has shaken nation-states to their foundations. There are many examples of mass protests sparked by social media, notably in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt (see related posts here and here). Anti-corruption activists such as Alexey Navalny test the weak spots in the authority and apparatus of the Russian state with live online broadcasts to a global community of real-time witnesses. For a recent example, see Navalny's crowdfunding campaign to develop live camera feeds at intersections and prevent roadside police intimidation, here. Global communications naturally erode nation-state divisions.

However, we have entered a new stage in this trend. It is fascinating to consider that the manner in which information is organized and communicated determines its durability, and its political and governmental impact, over time. Our current Web is impermanent and builds addresses associated with nation-states or centralized organizations. IPFS builds cryptographic addresses associated with the information at the address. It is 'content-addressed,' not nationally-, corporately- or institutionally-addressed. That change builds a distributed information network, which might decouple the nation from the state, and remake states into entities with no geopolitical identities. The alternative is 'techno-community-states' of various types.

Images Source: Altcoin Today.

For an example, see the Twitter hashtag #BlockchainsNotBorders, dominated by the project, BitNation: "Welcome to Governance 2.0: Borderless Decentralized Voluntary." On 19 February 2016, BitNation released the world’s first 'virtual nation' constitution on top of the blockchain of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Altcoin Today sampled the anarcho-capitalist libertarian rhetoric associated with this project's separation of nation and state:

By using borderless technology in the form of smart contracts, BitNation wants to remove geographical apartheid of individual nation states. Doing so will lead to governance services that are more transparent, cheaper, and overall better for the end user.

The concept of do-it-yourself governance may seem strange to some people, but the BitNation team is very confident in what they are trying to accomplish. While there is still a lot of work to be done before DIY governance becomes a mainstream trend, the team is currently focusing on security and dispute resolution. Ethereum smart contracts will play a big role in his department, according to BitNation founder Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof.

What makes these Ethereum smart contracts useful is how they bring a new layer of decentralization to the world. Unlike most services being used today, such as social media and email, BitNation’s governance 2.0 will not involve central authorities or governments. Needless to say, this model of governance is completely different to the centralized system of representative democracy most of the Western world is accustomed to.

Tempelhof feels that democracy is a massive failure, and the concept is – according to her – fundamentally flawed. Democracy as most people know it means governments give residents a variety of choices to vote on, without them having a say in the matter of what choices are offered. BitNation wants to change this by introducing democratic autonomous organizations (DAOs).

This concept needs some further explaining, however, as these Democratic Autonomous Organizations exist entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. From a governance point of view, decisions will be made by a group of parties who can decide on contracting people to do work, distributing assets, and even appointing shares. Two significant examples of a DAO can be found in Slock.it and DigixDAO. ... Tempelhof explained it as follows:

‘Decentralized’ means there is no single point of failure, like there is no central bank. If you look at Uber for example, they have got into trouble in Europe, they have been banned in France – but if Uber had been a DAO there would have been no bank accounts to freeze, nothing for regulators to ban. Decentralized also means personal autonomy. We decide what we do. Nobody tells us. And being borderless means that we are not confined by a passport to live in an area of war or famine. That’s as wrong as judging people on the color of their skin or sexual preference.

Another 'Governance 2.0' report from last year was entitled, Bitnation, Horizon and Blocknet join forces to deliver the world’s first platform for do-it-yourself governance services to 2.5 billion people across developing markets, using Bitcoin 2.0 technology (13 March 2015):

Bitnation, which is known mostly for its groundbreaking pilots including organizing the world’s first Blockchain Marriage and the world’s first World Citizenship ID on the blockchain, which has drawn attention from, amongst others, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, TechCrunch, Wired, and The New York Times. Bitnation aims to provide governance services in frontier and emerging markets, where it is needed the most. There are 2.5 billion unbanked in the world, the “System D” economy – the grey, unregulated markets – is a 10 trillion dollar economy, and 80% of the world’s population currently live in developing markets. Bitnation’s Founder and CEO, Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, worked for 7 years in challenging frontier environments, like Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and other countries, primarily with assessing people’s perception and experience of governance.

After the BitNation announcement that you can 'Create Your Own Nation in 140 Lines of Code,' performed in an online live event from an Irish pub in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 15 February 2016, one could step back and consider Orwell again.

Nineteen Eighty-Four asked how the individual's heart and soul could survive inside a totalitarian state. Orwell also pondered how information systems helped to construct, and were thereby reflected in, the governmental structure employed by political authority. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the two questions are intimately related. It is through systems of emotions, morality, thought and communications that we bind mentalities to power. This is why where once religion dominated the God-sourced monarchical state, the disciplines of history, philosophy and politics replaced religion in the era of the secular nation-state.

Of those three modern disciplines, aspiring technocrats have fixated on politics to develop their visions of  'techno-community-states.' But when history and philosophy are absent or only superficially considered, politics fares poorly in shotgun weddings with technology. We need all three disciplines together, and the help of other fields, to understand how tech-communities might be defined and connected to statehood, if at all. Chris Ellis, in conversation, preferred not to label the new permanent Web politically. His priority is to put "the technology into people's hands so that they get to have a say. Everyone gets their own narrative now. [And] it will be irrefutable that someone said [what they said]." He believes that it is better to allow time to tell whose narrative ends up being correct, rather than forcing older political theories onto the current evolution of the technosphere and its unprecedented circumstances and possibilities.

That is only partly true, because future truths don't spontaneously manifest themselves. There are always present-day conflicts to find a dominant narrative, and future corrections can be very difficult. Future historians will be actors who will help to decide which narrative ends up being 'correct' - in the sense of being the closest reflection of our Millennial reality, while also being relevant to future considerations - and for how long. But what is at least promised now, is that there actually will be future historians to make those analyses, as opposed to Winston Smiths, working in the Records Department of a future Ministry of Information. These are the overarching questions to the technical overview that follows; those questions will be explored in subsequent posts in this series on the Permanent Web.

The explanation on Ethereum starts at 2:25; the discussion on IPFS starts at 4:26; from The Daily Decrypt interview with Ethereum Director of Integration Taylor Gerring (26 January 2016). Gerring emphasized that Ethereum allows users to develop applications which sit on the cryptocurrency's blockchain. Video Source: Youtube.

In the January 2016 video above, The Daily Decrypt interviewed Ethereum cryptocurrency dev Taylor Gerring to explain what Ethereum is and how it might be combined with IPFS to build and incentivize a permanent Web. All data on IPFS are perpetually recorded online by means of peer-to-peer network distribution; and every single subsequent change to a given file is also permanently recorded by means of the amended file acquiring a new encrypted addresses, which can be indexed by a blockchain. This IPFS combination with cryptocurrency technology would establish a standing historical archive of online information. The encrypted addresses for any piece of information would ensure that that information could not be manipulated without the manipulation being noted in another encrypted process. Proponents in the open source coding community claim that this combination will build a new Web to function as the Web should have, from the start.