Where Homo Sapiens is Headed
author: Nathan Acks
date: 2018-09-23
newsletter: Five Futures
volume: 2
issue: 6
Prologue
Another huge gap in newsletters, another change in format. The last iteration of Five Futures was an ambitious attempt to push me to write something more original. I still like the idea of doing serialized essays, and will probably attempt it again at some point. But right now I just need to write, to get something out there. And that something needs to be relatively easy to put together, because the day job isnât helping in the time-management department right now.
So hereâs a bit of an experiment⊠Shorter takes (occassionally paired with emoji, Azeem Azhar style), arranged into five broad narrative arcs. Each arc is less a story of the future, and more a sense, a feeling, of a current in the present. Less Pythia in the Temple of Apollo, and more Ozymandias and his wall of TVs.
Anyway, thatâs the idea at least. Letâs see how well it works.
Chapter 1
đł Whales. Why are they so big?
More evidence that the Amazon basin was densely populated before European arrival, and that the âprimevalâ rain forest that exists today is actually nothing of the sort.
đŸ Modern industrial agriculture has drastically decreased the price of food. Itâs also made it less nutritious.
đ Industrial agriculture has also been a significant factor in the hollowing out of small-town America.
đ§ The Colorado River has been over-used for a long time, and the tensions between the states that depend on it are starting to boil over.
â Both the Eastern and Western Antarctic ice sheets are now shrinking, and the physics of melting ice means that itâs the East Coast of the United States that will be hardest hit.
The chances of the world keeping global warming below 1.5° C is, at this point, vanishingly small⊠But itâs not yet zero.
đ Burning fossil fuels does more than warm the planet, however - it also impacts human health in a variety of other ways. The new EPA âclean powerâ plan ignores these effects, and by their own estimates will cause thousands of premature deaths.
đŠ At least Bank of the West is divesting from fossil fuels. Wyoming is not happy about it.
The political case for restricting fossil fuel extraction.
California governor Jerry Brown is one of the USâs indisputable leaders in the fight to stop global warming. Heâs also not doing nearly enough.
Ozone-destroying CFCs emissions have spiked in recent years, after decades of decline. The culprit appears to be Chinaâs barely-regulated construction industry.
đ Across Europe, insect populations are crashing. Itâs hard to imagine a more ominous omen.
A newly discovered section from âThe Epic of Gilgameshâ gives the story a surprisingly ecological twist.
Chapter 2
đ» The definitive timeline of Russiaâs hacking of the DNC, the Clinton presidential campaign, and local governments is a useful âbirds-eyeâ view of the 2016 information operations. If you work in politics these are now the baseline threats you need to be guarding against.
So far Russian information operations related to the 2018 US mid-terms seem to be relatively quiet. But ârelatively quietâ is not the same as absent.
One place where Russia is still active is in organizing protests. But that doesnât mean that the protests are âfakeâ.
The story of misinformation on social media isnât just about Russian trolls, however. Itâs ordinary people who make âfake newsâ and conspiracy theories go viral.
đș You know whatâs also spreading conspiracy theories? YouTube Kids.
đ° Revitalizing local news has been seen by some as a way of innoculating US society against weaponized misinformation. After all, the reasoning goes, Americans trust local news more than national news⊠Which is something the Russians realize too.
Another proposed solution to the spread of misinformation on social media is the promotion of âmedia literacyâ. But simply encouraging a critical approach to the media could actually make things worse.
Tribalism has played a major role in 20th Century conflicts around the world. The economic dynamics of the US in the 21st Century are making tribal conflicts more likely here as well.
Cultural identity is a more important factor in political alignment on the right than the left, at least within the US.
đ„ Deep fakes, the mythic film âShazaamâ, and the collapse of consensus reality.
Italian politics has always looked weird to outsiders. Is the countryâs most recent government just another example of Italy being Italy, or a portent of things to come?
Chapter 3
Diversity increases conflict and makes people uncomfortable⊠And thatâs a good thing.
It might be even better, except that white men all but sabotage their coworkers when women or non-whites are their boss.
đĄ Think that white flight is a thing of the past? Think again.
đ In New York City, âquality of lifeâ complaints are a weapon of gentrification.
đ Parking requirements in many US cities are making housing less affordable.
đČ #Occupy made the idea of class warfare fashionable again. But if you look at the numbers, itâs less about the top 1% vs. the bottom 99%, but rather the top 10% vs. the bottom 90%. And that extra 9.9% holds a lot of people who like to think of themselves as âmiddle classâ.
đ It turns out that US manufacturing really is imploding, but the way we aggregate economic data has hidden the decline.
You know itâs bad when Vox is calling out centrist Democrats as intellectually bankrupt.
âȘ The modern GOP is a party that melds corporate interests with conservative Christianity. Itâs a political match that was largely masterminded by a single radical clergyman.
Hobby Lobby as both exemplar and driver of white evangelical cultural identity.
đ« In the US, just 3% of the population owns half of the nationâs guns. An that 3% fits a very specific profile.
The old are more likely to be Republicans and the young Democrats, but that has less to do with how our opinions change with age and more to do with the fact that Democrats die young.
Intergenerational conflict is beginning to fracture the US environmental movement.
Chapter 4
đ A brief dive into the design of Japanese train stations.
We implement automation to establish regular systems, avoid mistakes, and reduce friction. This is not always a good thing.
đ„ What affects are computer algorithms having on state governance? So far, their record in health care isnât so great.
đŠ How traffic lights subtly disadvantage pedestrians.
The age of pre-crime has arrived, courtesy of the LAPD and Palantir.
đź âPredictive policingâ software likes to sell itself as âbroken windows policingâ for the 21st Century. Which is probably a more accurate analogy than its supporters would care to admit.
Believe in that gun ownership is important? Angry at government over-reach? Written an inflammatory Facebook post in the heat of the moment? Then the FBI might be getting ready to bust you as a domestic terrorist⊠But only if youâre black.
Violence traumatizes not just those involved and their families, but also their entire community. Unsurprisingly, this remains true when that violence is inflicted by representatives of the state.
Many on the left were disturbed and enraged when the Trump Administration began separating children of undocumented immigrants from their parents. But the same thing has been happening for decades to US citizens as well.
đ« Normally when we talk about the âschool-to-prison pipelineâ, weâre referring to the increasing entaglement of schools with their local police departments, and the way that this law enforcement presence is predominantly focused on non-white children. Sometimes this process can be shockingly explicit.
US prisons are cutting back on in-person visitations. Inmates and their families are paying the price.
Chapter 5
For most insects, an infection with cordyceps fungi means gradually slipping into a zombie-like state followed by a gruesome âAliensâ-like death. But for cicadas, cordyceps is what keeps them alive.
Should a spiderâs web be considered part of its mind?
đœ The most famous back-of-the-envelope method of estimating how many other intelligent species exist is called the Drake Equation, and even plugging conservative numbers into it suggests that the universe should be filled with alien civilizations. This has lead to the âFermi Paradoxâ - if alien civilizations are so common, then why have we seen no evidence for them? It turns out, however, that treating the Drake Equation probabilisticly dissolves the Fermi Paradox: We are likely to be alone in our galaxy, and thereâs a good chance that we are in fact the only intelligent species in the entire observable universe.
The only good online fandom left is âDuneâ.
Mediocrity is evolutionary slack.
Epilogue
Originally I was going to write something longer and more conteplative here, but itâs been almost exactly a week since I started writing this and Iâm basically out of steam right now. Mind you, I havenât added any new articles to this list during that time - it just took me that long to review, sort, and trim down the list of interesting links I accumulated over the last six months. Iâm going to experiment on building up future newsletters slowly over the course of a week or two, a little bit each day, and see how that works.
Until next timeâŠ