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There are many problems with the idea of artificial intelligence, but one of the worst is that it assumes “intelligence” can be measured objectively. And then, because Silicon Valley funds AI development, intelligence is assigned a monetary value. AI is like a mind that has been reduced to various cuts of meat, which are then sold as commodities.

That sounds like a twenty-first century cyberpunk scenario, but in fact people have been quantifying intelligence and putting a price tag on thought for over a century. IQ tests became popular in the 1910s, and were used to determine people’s eligibility for work, schooling, and even civil rights. In 1923, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács wrote a powerful essay about how capitalism shapes the consciousness of knowledge workers. He described how “[the worker’s] qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world.” What Lukács described, ultimately, was a form of labor where we are forced to think thoughts that are not our own.

I'm back from a long hiatus on this newsletter, most of which was spent touring for my novel The Terraformers, and finishing up my forthcoming nonfiction book Stories Are Weapons (coming in summer 2024 from W.W. Norton!), an exploration of how psychological warfare has shaped the American mind. At last, I'll be returning to writing this newsletter regularly. My focus will be on short essays, somewhere in the gray area between a classic tweet and a classic magazine feature. I've grown impatient with the idea that one must write something extremely short or extremely long in order to be understood.

So let's get started. In June, I was invited to speak at a workshop for Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, where I joined an incredible group of writers and editors who work on "applied science fiction." I opened the workshop with a (short!) introduction to the idea. Here's what I said.

Applied Science Fiction

It's happening. I'm about to go on my first in-person book tour in 3 years.

Last week I published a column in New Scientist about how the singularity is no longer a helpful model for thinking about the future. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote:

I was watching the new series based on William Gibson’s 2014 sci-fi novel The Peripheral when I had one of those nerdy, late-night realizations: cyberpunk has become the retro-future, a vision of tomorrow that feels like the past. Even Gibson himself, who coined the term “cyberspace”, has stopped writing cyberpunk, a subgenre devoted to corporate dystopias centered on virtual reality and sentient AI …

As the cyberpunk vision explodes, its philosophical underpinnings are also melting down. Silicon Valley’s investment in VR and AI was pushed in part by a belief in the “singularity”. Described by sci-fi author Vernor Vinge in the 1990s, this is a hypothetical event in which technological advancement accelerates so fast that humanity is transformed. As Vinge once told me, experiencing the singularity would be like seeing new mountains rise on the horizon. Self-aware computers would be evolving so fast they could remold the planet in the time it took to eat breakfast …

The Peripheral replaces the singularity with another vision of how technology will transform civilisation. Instead of a high-tech turning point driven by powerful AIs, it imagines the “Jackpot”, a series of horrific, human-caused events that have wrecked the planet. The population has plummeted, while the rich “klept” class of the future uses quantum tunnelling to send data back to the present. There, they set up corporations that can funnel money to various groups. Some do it to change the future, but most are just amusing themselves, treating people like avatars in a game. The scenario is a literalisation of Gibson’s famous comment that “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed”.

The point is that AI will not usher in a new phase of existence. Instead it will make a small number of pseudo-monarchs very rich, and the rest of us will become their playthings, struggling to survive in a post-Jackpot world where resources are diminishing. Cyberpunk imagined virtual worlds based on 20th-century technocracy. But The Peripheral‘s vision suggests our prospects look quite different. Now, it feels like we are tottering towards a scenario where the most vulnerable will be abused by leaders who believe they are from the future.

One of my favorite authors, Ken MacLeod, tweeted the article, taking issue with how I’d used the word “technocracy” in the last paragraph. We had a brief back and forth, where he pointed out that technocrats were more like the heroes in Golden Age science fiction, the military-industrial complex men whose goals were antithetical to those of cyberpunk’s chaotic antiheroes. He had a good point. I should have used a different word, like maybe “techno-oligarchy” or “anarcho-capitalism.”

I had a bittersweet feeling after the exchange, thinking about how nice it was to have a place where I could talk to someone whose opinion I respect, and have my perspective changed by their comments. For a few minutes, I felt the imminent loss of Twitter keenly.

I can never resist a weird scenario, especially when it’s scientifically plausible. In my short story “A Hole in the Light,” published a few days ago in the excellent Sunday Morning Transport newsletter, I went deep on the weirdly plausible. The story is about a civilization of amoebas living in the early universe, right around the time that the ambient gas left after the Big Bang started to coalesce into stars and galaxies on a massive scale. I first started mulling this one over back in 2014, when I read a paper by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb (yes, the guy who is convinced that meteor ‘Oumuamua was a spacecraft) about what he called the “habitable epoch” of the universe.

What Loeb pointed out in this paper is that we’re used to thinking of our current universe, with its galaxies and vast lightless voids between, as the most obvious time for life to arise. But what if the early universe was a better time? Billions of years ago, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe would have been full of warm gas. It could keep every planetary body as warm as Earth is in the glow of our yellow star. As Loeb told me in an interview, “For a long time, we’ve had this preconception that life is here on Earth, but the universe is dead. But maybe we should be thinking of this as a living universe. We may be relative latecomers to the game.” 

When I asked him what life might have been like in this universe of cozy, illuminated gas, Loeb said it would probably have been quite simple. “Algae,” he suggested. At that time in cosmic history, environmental conditions changed so rapidly that species would have to evolve quickly before everything transformed. It seems unlikely a complex civilization like ours would arise in such difficult conditions. But what if it could? 

I spent a very long lunch pumping ASU astronomer Jackie Monkiewicz for more details about exactly what the early universe might have looked like, especially when it came to the behavior of stars.

Hey friends. 

It’s been a while since I’ve sent out a newsletter, and it’s nice to be back! I’ve been hard at work on finishing up my novel The Terraformers (coming in January), while simultaneously researching and writing my next book, a nonfiction history of psychological warfare in the United States. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter.

That’s because the collapse is coming to Twitter. I’ve seen it before: I watched Friendster and MySpace die at the turn of the century, their once-vibrant memes decaying in abandoned accounts, comments rotting into spam. If you’ve been on Twitter as long as I have, which is going on fifteen years, you’ve seen the signs too. 

People who were once major Twitter personalities have abandoned it for other platforms – they’re blowing up on #booktok or writing paywalled newsletters or dishing out the mainstream media op-eds. Accounts with the most followers, like Barack Obama and Katy Perry, lost hundreds of thousands of followers after Elon Musk announced his takeover bid. 

It's been a while since I sent out a newsletter, but I'm back to bring you irregular updates on current scientific and historical discoveries, as well as my own work. Today, we've got a little bit of both.

The anniversary of 9/11, marking twenty years of the U.S. "war on terror," drowned out news of the latest salvo in another war -- the war on reproductive rights, whose kinetic force was felt keenly in Texas after the Supreme Court allowed a state law banning nearly all abortions to stand. What's unique about this law is that it essentially turns citizens into bounty hunters, allowing them to sue anyone who "aids" people seeking abortion more than six weeks after they've gotten pregnant. Successful suits will result in payouts of $10,000 or more. Essentially, Texas is creating a new army of mercenary surveillance troops, paid to spy on their neighbors' private medical procedures.

It's not the first time the struggle for reproductive rights has turned citizens into mercenaries. In my novel , I describe how the nineteenth century anti-birth control crusader Anthony Comstock perfected the "citizen's arrest" for obscenity. As Amy Werbel describes in her incredible book , Comstock and his followers dragged more than one woman into New York police stations in the middle of abortions. They also arrested people who published information about birth control and abortion -- many of those people, including , killed themselves rather than face long prison sentences. My characters, time travelers from the present and future, are fighting to bend the timeline toward reproductive justice. But how do you win against a force of anonymous mercenaries, emboldened by laws designed to undermine the autonomy of women and pregnant people?

There’s an odd piece of data about the late Neolithic in the Mediterranean region. Roughly 7500 years ago, during the last gasp of the stone age before we began working with metals, people abandoned their burgeoning cities and returned to small village life. Below, you can see a graph showing how the size of settlements dropped dramatically during this time.

Whenever I think about the future of urban life, there’s a YouTube video that pops into my mind. In it, a magnificent, very calm moose stands in a backyard swimming pool, occasionally wading deeper, while commentary is delivered by the family who owns the pool. This moose has decided to take a dip in the bustling but still woodsy suburb of Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft’s headquarters are located. And the humans are appalled and excited by turns.

This isn’t some bizarre turn of events brought on by humans encroaching on moose habitats. In fact, it’s a great example of how non-human animals adapt quickly to human-built landscapes. Moose love to swim, and they do it even when there are no backyard pools around -- below, you can see one fording the Snake River in Wyoming. 

I’ve been writing about archaeology for several years, and that often means traveling to the places where researchers are excavating. Every site has different rules, and local environmental conditions mean that people use different tools and techniques to dig. But there are a lot of other details about archaeology — and archaeologists — that you might not know. Here are a few things that I learned while writing Four Lost Cities, sometimes the hard way.

1. Be prepared to get dirty in ways you don’t expect

Most excavations involve removing dirt, mud, mold, and grime from ancient stuff -- anything from a giant wall of stone, to a tiny fragment of pottery. So you’re going to get dirty if you’re walking around looking at things. What I didn’t expect was that I would be taking off my shoes and getting my socks and feet dirty. If you’re climbing down into an excavation block where people are actively digging, you don’t want to wear your rugged boots and step on something accidentally.

This picture of a warty pig is giving me life. It’s from a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where people drew it roughly 45,000 years ago, along with several other pigs and some handprints. It’s not the first time archaeologists have found extraordinarily ancient cave art in Indonesia either.

In 2017, the same researchers found a complicated painting in another Indonesian cave. Dated at 44,000 years old, the painting showed more warty pigs — apparently a favorite among the peoples of these islands — as well as hunting scenes. Best of all, the tableau included therianthropes, or fantastical human-animal hybrid creatures, which hint at complex mythological backstory to the pictures. One is a human with a bird head or muzzle, another has a tail, and still others appear to be part-reptile.

These images are tens of thousands of years older than the famous drawings at Lascaux in France, which are dated to about 17,000 years ago. So the warty pig is simply the latest piece of evidence that cultures with complex symbolism were developing in the tropics long before they did in Europe. Another piece of evidence comes from proto-farms, which have been discovered dating back 45,000 years in the equatorial regions of Africa, the Americas, and southeast Asia. These proto-farms, which involved clearing land with fire, draining swamps, and planting trees, were the seeds of a distinctly tropical urban culture that developed in these regions.

I first became obsessed with Çatalhöyük about ten years ago, when I first read about the 9,000 year-old settlement in central Turkey that was among the world’s earliest urban places. I was fascinated by its architecture, which was nothing like a modern city — people entered through doors in their roofs, and ambled across the city using ladders and rooftop walkways.

The built environment was also imbued with symbolic meanings. People buried their dead beneath their floors, often right under their beds, and studded their walls with animal bones, teeth, and plastered bull skulls called bucrania. And they must have loved this place very much, because it was continuously occupied for 1,500 years.

I grew up a few miles away from Disneyland, so naturally I visited the park a lot. My dad, who’d grown up in L.A., knew the secret to a perfect Disneyland experience: Visit during January, on a weekday. Sure, some of the rides would be closed for repairs, but the crowds would be so thin that you could go through the Haunted Mansion fifteen times in a row without ever waiting in line. So every year, he’d tell my teachers I was “sick,” and we’d hang out at Disneyland for a day during Southern California’s darkest, rainiest season. 

Those trips are how I memorized large parts of the Haunted Mansion voiceover -- especially the bit when you enter the ride through a giant elevator disguised as an ordinary room. As the elevator descends, the walls appear to grow longer and the ceiling recedes alarmingly.

 “Is this haunted room actually stretching? Or is it your imagination?” the voice intones as the paintings on the wall grow weirdly. It continues: “Consider this dismaying observation: This chamber has no windows and no doors. Which offers you this chilling challenge: To find a way out!!!” As the room is plunged into darkness, he adds with a cackle: “Of course -- there’s always my way!” That’s when everybody starts screaming, because a flicker of light has illuminated a skeleton swinging from a rope overhead.

I’m taking a MOOC from the University of Alberta called Indigenous Canada, and it’s the perfect history class for anyone who is curious about the way colonization really works. Native Studies professor Dr. Tracy Bear and her colleagues do an amazing job covering the past 500 years of relations between First Nations and the immigrants from Europe who eventually created a settler nation called Canada. It’s easy to see why over 200,000 students have taken this class. What’s been fascinating for me is learning about how so many violent encounters were precipitated by European misinformation campaigns that today we’d call fake news.

In the early 1600s, Europeans were fur crazy. They’d killed off most of the European beavers, whose pelts were used to make fashionable felt hats, and they were awed by the abundance of beaver in the Americas. The Dutch traded with coastal tribes for the furs, and made treaties with them that included provisions for things like safe passage on the rivers of the Hudson Valley, and deals to exchange goods. A famous example of this kind of treaty is the Two Row Wampum, a deal struck between Dutch traders and the Haudenosawnee (the confederacy of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas).

The Haudenosawnee and other indigenous groups had a long history of international relations, having made peace agreements and wars with their neighbors for millennia. Wampum belts were a ceremonial and pragmatic way of recording these relationships, using twine to weave purple and white shell beads (wampum) into symbolic patterns. In the Two Row Wampum, the two purple lines represent the Dutch and the Haudenosawnee, living alongside each other in peace and without interfering with the other’s business. Though the Dutch were used to doing things the European way, by scribbling with quill and ink on parchment and sealing it up with wax, they accepted the indigenous-style peace and friendship treaty.

Many of us have reached the space madness phase of the quarantimes, but here are five things that might keep you sane for another week.

Brain implants for fun and profit

A group of scientists have used brain implants to restore vision to blind monkeys. A camera sends images through an array of electrodes sitting on the visual cortex, and they turn the images into electrical signals that the brain “sees.” It’s kind of like a cochlear implant, which does a similar job for the human ear, transducing sound into electrical signals for the brain. The ultimate result of this experiment could lead to something like the visual sensor that the character Geordi (LeVar Burton) wears on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it could also lead to all kinds of science fictional stuff that’s a little creepy, like sending images to your brain that aren’t there. The ultimate gaslight machine. You can hear more about it on the Science podcast.

The first wave of Covid-19 vaccines are just weeks away. But before you obliterate your memories of 2020, we need to prepare for the next pandemic with a thought experiment. Journey with me to a world where FOX News owns Twitter, and Lady Gaga’s production company is making an action comedy based on Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist masterpiece The Second Sex. Welcome to the shining future of 2030. 

But uh oh. President Winfrey has just announced that the CDC is reporting a new infectious disease they’re calling “respiratory agent disorder,” or RAD for short. Slightly deadlier than the flu, RAD is spreading quickly in China. Nobody is sure yet how deadly it might get, so President Winfrey is urging people to wash their hands, wear masks, practice social distancing, and wait for the vaccine in a few months.

Superspreader warehouse

Fans are going nuts over The Crown, but I suggest you watch another TV series that brashly exposed a different side of British history: Harlots. It’s the violent, explicit tale of two brothels in 18th century London, whose fates ultimately decide the future of Parliament. Created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman for Hulu, Harlots shifts our focus from the center to the margins of society, and epitomizes a new trend in historical storytelling where social power isn’t always located in mansions and palaces. It comes from the streets, the bars, and the brothels.

I’m a sucker for hair-and-hat dramas, with their sumptuous costumes and sets that recreate a forgotten time. The problem is that most period pieces feel so far removed from reality that they’re almost fairy tales, complete with omnipotent kings and queens who stomp their tiny feet. It may be entertaining, but it’s also annoying for those of us who want to know what everybody else was doing 300 years ago.

The London we see over the course of three seasons in Harlots would be unrecognizable to people whose idea of the past has been shaped by Masterpiece Theater and snippets of Samuel Johnson. Its streets are thronging with people of color, sex workers, and GLBT folks whose existence is usually ignored in period dramas. We follow the lives of Margaret Wells, the madam of a successful brothel, and her adult daughters Charlotte and Lucy, two of the most sought-after whores in the city. 

“They” is the pronoun I waited my entire life for. I’ve been nonbinary for fifty years, which is a complete pain in the ass if you have no word for it. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I used to tell my friends that I wasn’t a girl, and I wasn’t a boy. A few of those friends came out as gay, and I think they understood more than anyone else. But still, there were limits. How do you come out as something that isn’t a thing in your community?

I continue to invent new ways to communicate with the birds who hang out in my backyard. This week, I attempt to discuss anthropomorphization with a black phoebe and two crows.

I have named the black phoebe Bath Queen because she was the first bird in the neighborhood to take advantage of the extremely small and precarious bird bath I have attached to the railing of my balcony. It’s a nice spot, right under the peppermint willow. There’s a lot of dappled sunlight and about a zillion flies zooming around, which is great for Bath Queen because black phoebes eat bugs. They also love water.

Elon Musk wants to park a Tesla on Mars. Let’s go to Venus instead, and build a new way of life.

It’s possible that life already evolved on Venus, and you may have heard about a recent paper showing phosphenes in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Phosphenes are a chemical signature of biological processes, and so everybody got excited — though a re-examination of the evidence suggests the phosphene sighting may have been a trick of the light.

It’s spooky season in the United States. We’re putting on costumes, eating a ton of candy, and voting for the least scary devils on the ballot. Plus, we’re breaking out the spine-tingling tales! Today, we’re going to talk about why White people are the monsters in several notable horror stories of the past few years. It goes back, in part, to a nineteenth century geneticist who thought we could breed humans like dogs.

Feral Whiteness

I’ve been working on an article about satirical horror for the New York Times, and during the course of my “research” I finally watched Midsommar. You know, the indie flick about a group of American grad students studying “pure” White people from an ancestral Nordic culture of the sort fetishized by Nazis? Yeah, that one. So in Midsommar, the aforementioned students go with friends to a remote part of Sweden so they can participate in summer rituals with a small pagan commune. Pretty quickly they discover that the fertility festival they expected actually involves human sacrifice, as well as coercive sperm donation from “outsiders” to prevent the commune from becoming too inbred.

Though the tone of the movie is sombre, it’s also full of trippy, gory freakouts that are occasionally so absurd that I laughed out loud. Partly that’s because of the film’s social context — it came out in 2019, at a time when White nationalists were crawling all over social media, promoting the idea that “Western civilization” is the pinnacle of culture. In Midsommar, however, we see clearly the murderous savagery at the core of this notion of Whiteness.

Hey! It’s the first issue of my newsletter! Thanks for being here! Today we’re going to talk about a guy whose head exploded almost 2,000 years ago — and the brotherhood known as the Augustales that he was part of.

A lot of odd things were preserved virtually intact when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, burying the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii under a thick layer of ash. There were election signs on walls, beautiful mosaics, multi-seater toilets, wooden display shelves, luxurious goblets, and decorative wind chimes shaped like penises. Yes, really. And now, a group of scholars have documented their discovery of human brain cells at Herculaneum. They had been vitrified — that is, turned to glass — by the 984° F gas that accompanied the volcanic eruption.

Above, you can see the scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of some neurons from our anonymous glassy-brained friend.