Ken's Blog

Continuing from yesterday…

The stark dichotomy between symmetric and asymmetric views in blended reality suggests an economic model. The symmetric view can be seen as an immersive digital commons.

According to Wikipedia, the commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.

In an ideal world, this commons would be available to everyone at no charge, supported by the common tax base. In this sense it would be like public park, or paved roads.

Asymmetric views into the immersive digital world would be akin to private property. If you had enough money, you could build a fabulous digital palace just for you and your loved ones.

But everybody gets to play in the park.

If we consider the scenario presented yesterday, but imagine everyone is wearing blended reality glasses, the situation changes. As the man behind the counter speaks, his glasses are tracking his eye gaze.

From there, it is just a short jump for the underlying networked software to “highlight” the woman he is talking to. For example, she might appear to glow for a brief period of time.

Note that I am implicitly positing a world in which everyone sees the same virtual world. This is how things work in the physical world, where if I am holding an object in my hand, then you are able to see it.

But it is not inevitable that the future will work that day. Already we have walled digital gardens, such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Those companies have no incentive to make everything available to everyone. In fact, they are incented to do exactly the opposite — a particularly useful strategy if you are a corporation that earns its money by selling ads.

But to me a much better outcome is the Wikipedia model: You and I always see exactly the same objects, albeit from different directions. The result is a more open and equitable virtual world.

More tomorrow.

I was at a CVS in NYC recently, and witness a small kerfuffle. Near the entrance, a woman was about to leave, while at the same time a man had just entered.

One of the CVS employees manning a register called loudly across the store “Hey you!” Both the man and the woman turned to look.

The man looked startled. I think he thought he was about to be accused of shoplifting. “Are you talking to me?” he asked.

“No,” the employee shouted, “I’m talking to her.”

It turned out that the woman had accidentally left something at the counter. The woman retrieved the thing she had forgotten, while the man looked visibly relieved.

When this encounter happened, I thought to myself that no confusion would have occurred if everyone had had the right tools.

Suppose, as a thought excperiment, all three people were wearing blended reality glasses, networked together.

The employee could have used some kind of future interface to point to the woman, not the man. Both the man and the woman, and everyone else, would have immediately understood to whom he was speaking.

At the same time, this future scenario, and the possible ways that it could be implemented, raises some very interesting questions.

More tomorrow.

In order to create the Great Depression, the United States did two things, although not on purpose. First, during the boom times of the 1920s, it enacted vast deregulation of the financial sector, so that when the boom times went bust, the market crashed very badly. Then it enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which greatly raised import duties on goods from abroad.

The combination of an unchecked market crash and then the lack of ability to offset economic decline through global trade was disastrous. In the next few years the U.S. economy spiraled downward, and millions of people suffered greatly.

This time it looks like we are going to do it in the reverse order. If I correctly understand the rhetoric of the incoming administration, our new commander in chief will first enact a new version of Smoot-Hawley, blocking free global trade through artificially high import tariffs.

Then, with the kind advice of his friend Mr. Musk, he is going to help our nation’s hard working billionaires by enacting massive financial deregulation. Then we are all going to stand back and wait for something to break.

After the years of depression that this will bring on, and a lot of suffering by many Americans, we will need good leadership to help pick up the pieces. I just hope that this time we can find another FDR to clean up the mess.

I know it is too soon to predict these things, but I will take a stab at it anyway. If I were him, I would spend the next four years focusing on making sure I don’t end up in jail afterward.

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for rounding up millions of families in America and throwing them in internment camps. Or am I being too optimistic?

The outcome of the election was not completely surprising. As James Carville famously said “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In the wake of the pandemic, the economies of most countries have consistently tanked, and sure enough, whoever has been in power has been voted out in most democracies that have held national elections. This worldwide phenomenon goes way beyond whatever idiot happens to be running against the incumbent party.

In our case, the hope is that our incumbent will be consistent with his past behavior. He says fiery things to scare people into voting for him, and then once in office he does very little.

This particular incumbent does not have the discipline, the inclination or the organizational skills to do anything other than line his own pockets and the pockets of his friends. He doesn’t particularly believe in anything other than his own self-interest, which in this case may be a good thing.

So I am hopeful that we will not actually see him pushing for dismantling healthcare, rounding up millions of Americans into internment camps, criminalizing political speech he doesn’t like, destroying international trade via punitive tariffs, or any of the other nutty things he said in order to get elected. With any luck, we will mostly see him playing golf and hawking commemorative coins on-line.

And then, in another four years, when the economy continues to tank because nobody in Washington is doing anything useful for the average American, the pendulum will swing the other way, like it generally does. That, at least, is the hope.

Last night we watched Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy. I had been curious to revisit this old comedy favorite. I was not expecting it to resonate so strongly.

And I was certainly not expecting the eerie and disturbing way that the idiotic political rallies in the movie’s dystopian future resembled the Republican presidential candidate’s October 28 rally in Madison Square Garden. How far our nation has traveled in 18 years.

If you had said to anyone in 2006 that those bizarre movie scenes would one day become our nation’s political reality, I am sure they wouldn’t have believed you. The person you were talking to could just point out that such a thing couldn’t actually happen, because real life political candidates are neither that coarse nor that stupid.

Yet here we are. Happy Election Day.

To recap, tomorrow millions of Americans will have an opportunity to choose, as their leader, a man who is a convicted felon, a serial rapist and molester of women, an enforcer of racist housing policies, a bumbling denier of medical science whose mismanagement caused millions of Americans to die unnecessarily in a pandemic, a man who spreads disgusting rumors that immigrants eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs (ok, that one’s been around a while — it’s been used on Chinese and Italian immigrants and others at various times in U.S. history), who uses racist dogwhistles against blacks, Jews, hispanics and anyone else he thinks his audience of the moment might enjoy hating, who cannot put two sentences together without rambling like an idiot, who is trying very hard to position himself as American women’s worst nightmare come true, a man who led a violent insurrection against the United States, who literally threatens his political opponents with physical violence, who is promising, if elected, to throw millions of Americans into concentration camps, to abandon our international allies (that one might just be a favor for his bestie Vladimir Putin), to impose punishing tariffs on imports that will end up being paid for by the American working class, to repeal the first healthcare plan we’ve gotten that is actually working, and to fill our government with yes-men and lackeys so that his power will go unchecked.

In short, a creep.

Or those Americans can choose to elect an actual human being, someone who has shown compassion, thoughtfulness and common sense, has presented a detailed and well thought out economic plan for the middle class, and in a one-on-one debate displayed the discipline and intelligence to run circles around her addled, hate-spouting opponent.

Tough choice, isn’t it?

Just today the creep told his supporters that he never should have left the White House. He said it in a way that made it sound like he had a choice.

I wonder whether he really believes he had a choice. Maybe he’s thinking “I should not have been so nice when they politely invited me to leave.” Which begs the question — if he really believes, as he keeps saying, that he won four years ago, why didn’t he just stay? Was he forced to leave even though he had won?

That sequence of events only makes sense if you believe that the entire apparatus of our democratic voting system is a sham and a fraud. That there has been a vast conspiracy to deny that man his rightful victory. An enormous conspiracy with everyone in on it — our elected officials, the Press, the many thousands of volunteers at election venues who have never met each other — all coordinating to create a make-believe election result.

If people are willing to believe something like that, then they are willing to believe anything. So I suspect that if the creep loses in a few days, he might manage to convince a lot of people that the fix was in the whole time, and that the only remaining choice may be violent insurrection.

I don’t know about you, but that worries me.

There are so many weird things about those Republican candidates. But what really impresses me is the Veepacreep — that guy who is following in his master’s footsteps.

It seems that his particular focus is taking away the rights of women. Maybe there is something about women — about the whole concept that they are human beings with equal rights — which drives him crazy.

It seems to me that there should be an apt nickname for such a person. Someone who follows along blindly as his master enumerates one hateful statement after another.

What do you call someone who was created by the creep, and then trained to follow behind him blindly? Maybe we should call him the “Handmade tail”.