Chandra Clarke's Blog

With a tip of the hat to Murphy . . .

There are scientists out there working on a Unified Theory of Everything.

By this I mean they are trying to come up with this Really Big Idea that explains things like how the universe came into being (was it delivered by FedEx or dropped off by some gigantic stork?) and why stars go “twinkle twinkle” instead of flashing something useful like “eat at Mars.”

Now I’ve read some of the work in this field and it is really quite interesting. However, it seems to me that it has a long way to go. This is because they’re not asking the really important questions, such as: Why don’t M&M candies melt in your hands? and  Why does toast always land jam side down?

Therefore, in the interest of advancing scientific research, I am starting a list of things I think need immediate investigation.

Chandra’s Universal Law#1: People who own dogs apparently cannot hear them barking at 2 a.m.  Yes, I admit to harbouring some dogi-cidal tendencies lately. You see, there is a dog in my neighbourhood that barks incessantly, every night, beginning right around 2 a.m. and continuing until about 6 a.m. Worse, the dog seems to have a limited vocabulary: it repeats the exact same pattern of barks over and over and over again.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I love dogs I am mush when it comes to puppies. And yes, my own dogs have been known to bark. In fact, one of my own dogs was very hard hard to shut up sometimes because she went deaf, but there was a period there of, I swear, selective hearing. A typical front-porch conversation between myself and my dog went something like this:

Bark.

Taffy, be quiet.

Bark! Bark!

Taffy, cut that out.

BARK!

Taffy! Don’t make me walk all the way over there!

BARK! BARK!

TAFFY! SHUT UP!

BARKBARKBARKBARK!

*me walking in front of her and clapping loudly to get her attention*

Woof.

.

.

.

Woof. (she liked to have the last word you see)

My point with all of this, is that I tried to do something about my dog. Other families can have a dog bark for four hours straight right underneath their window and not hear it, while the rest of the neighbourhood can practically recite the canine canto by heart.  Are these people missing gene #345, otherwise known as I-HRK9? Are they missing the chemical 5,7-dihydroxydogamine? Do they need to have subwoofers installed? Only research will tell.

Chandra’s Universal Law #2: All service personnel make and break exactly 3.7 appointments with you before actually showing up at your door. We currently have a problem with our water softener — the problem being, that it is oozing salty water all over our basement. The upside is that the salt residue is making really neat-looking circular patterns on the floor. The downside is . . . no wait, that was the downside.

We called for service of course, and received a hearty “we’ll be there first thing Monday morning!” Seeing as it was a Thursday when we called, we thought this … quite convenient.

Of course, come Monday, we foolishly believed that someone would actually show up, and took the morning off work to let Mr. Service Person into the house. Morning turned into afternoon turned into evening turned into a phone call: “Hi, couldn’t make it, will be there Wednesday.”

As for Wednesday, see above paragraph.

A new appointment was made for Friday afternoon, and gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know it but Mr. Service Person called to let us know that he had been called away to an emergency.

Hmm.

Gas lines leak, phone lines get shredded and electrical wires come down…. but … well, I’m struggling to think of examples of water softener emergencies. I mean, besides salty water leaking all over the place? I am sure however, that the fact it was a beautiful Friday afternoon just before a long weekend had absolutely nothing to do with it.

If this keeps up, I shall soon be able to offer tickets to the Clarke Salt Marshes.

But to get back to my law, it seems to me this happens far too often and with too many service companies . . . . cable, telephone, power, you name it. Do service personnel take special training courses on how to raise and dash hopes? Is there some physical constant preventing service companies from sending out help on a night shift or — gasp — a 24 hour basis?

Questions worthy of scientific inquiry indeed. After all, if we can lob money at “cross cultural studies of the semiotic management and transformation of facial features in the make-up and masks of performers” then surely we can toss money at these questions.

So pay attention you graduate students out there, Chandra’s Universal Laws will soon be on your final exam. Stay tuned for more.

Visit the blog at With a tip of the hat to Murphy . . ..

The Art of the Presidency: How to Turn Power Into Profit (Legally… or Close Enough)

“They said the presidency wasn’t a business. I made it the most successful business in history.”

Are YOU ready to make the presidency great — for your wallet?

Let’s cut the crap. You didn’t get into politics to “serve the people.” You got in to win. To dominate. To build an empire. And guess what?

The presidency is the best business opportunity in the world.

In my new course, “The Art of the Presidency,” I show you — step by beautiful step — how I turned the Oval Office into the C-Suite of my personal brand. You’ll learn how to do it too.

What You’ll Learn Inside:Brand Power 101 — From red hats to fake gold bars, I’ll teach you how to license your name to anything that moves — and charge a fortune.Mega Merch Profitability — Learn how to source from the cheapest factories in China, including where to get the best Made in the USA labels. Media Manipulation Mastery – Turn every “scandal” into a viral fundraising opportunity. The haters are your marketers.Family First Capitalism – Appoint your kids, funnel power, and keep the wealth in the dynasty, where it belongs.Grift Without Guilt – Hotels, speaking gigs, foreign guests, Super PACs. I show you how to do it all and call it “patriotism.”The Indictment Advantage – Facing 91 charges? GOOD. Watch your fundraising explode. I’ll show you how to milk the martyr complex.SPECIAL BONUS MODULE:Golf Grift: How I Made MILLIONS by Charging Taxpayers to Visit My Own Resorts

Here’s the genius:
When I wanted a break? I went golfing.
Where? At my OWN resorts.
Who came with me? Secret Service and all of my staff.
Who paid for all their food and lodgings? YOU did, directly into my bank account.

That’s right — I created a system where taxpayer dollars paid me to golf at my own properties. Lodging, meals, golf carts, the whole deal.

You’ll get the full blueprint:

How to direct federal staff to your propertiesHow to structure billing “by the book” (wink)How to make every vacation a cash-inHow to still call it “official business”

They called it a scandal. I called it a business model.

Ready to Rumble? What You Get:12 Step-by-Step Video Modules PDF Playbook: “Turn Every Handshake Into a Wire Transfer”Bonus Audio Track: “How I Turned My Florida Digs Into a Presidential Paywall”Certificate of Presidential Hustle – Hang it next to your fake university degree.Who Is This Course For?

This is for:

Rising politiciansFormer celebritiesBillionaire hopefuls with a credit card and a dreamInfluencers with no shameDictators who need a PR facelift

If you’ve got charisma, ego, and absolutely no problem monetizing the American flag, this course is for you.

Investment: Just $997

(Or 3 payments of $499.99. Because we believe in choice — especially for offshore accounts.) Enroll now and get my exclusive e-book:

Fake News, Real Profits: How to Monetize Media Meltdowns for Maximum Gains

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

Sign up TODAY for an extra hidden secret special awesome bigly module:

Joint ventures (JVs) with other grifters!

Why pay for advertising when you can cross promote with conspiracy theorists, Faux News, podcasters, Twitter bots, rocket bois, and other assorted misfits and miscreants for FREE! Activate the ragebaited manosphere to your cause! And learn how to have all of them take the fall if things go sideways!

WARNING: SPOTS ARE LIMITED

I can’t teach everyone how to fleece a nation. The IRS is watching. The DOJ is watching. The haters are always watching. So click fast, patriots.

And remember…

“Why retire when you can golf your way to government cash forever?”

Visit the blog at The Art of the Presidency: How to Turn Power Into Profit (Legally… or Close Enough).

Explaining the inexplicable

As I type this, a certain orange person and his enablers have taken a flawed, but mostly positive economy and smashed it headlong into a brick wall, while simultaneously destroying decades of stable trade relationships with allies. All the while, absolutely gutting the vital government services that millions of his citizens depend on.

The people mostly likely to be hardest hit by these moves are the people who have so far counted themselves as his biggest supporters. And who will, if the last ten or so years are any indicator, continue to be his biggest supporters, even through all the suffering to come.

Which leads to an obvious question: why do people so often work against their own best interests? Even when there is plenty of evidence to show that it will definitely be against their best interests? Even as they suffer the consequences in real time?

The phenomenon isn’t restricted to the US. In Canada, a provincial premier with an objectively terrible legislative agenda and track record recently swept into a third consecutive majority government. In the UK, a majority voted to leave the European Union with the terrible economic consequences that were predicted materializing almost immediately.

Lots of people have tried to explain the last several years. Pundits have tried to point at education, income, gender and race divides, with little success, as neither orange guy’s fans nor Brexit supporters fit neatly into any demographic.

The concept of “low information voters” goes a little further to explain the phenomenon. These are people with one or more jobs, kids, elders who need care, busy social lives, those who get their news from the occasional TV or radio sound bites, people they know, and whatever memes cross their social media feed and that they happen to see. They have an incomplete understanding of very complex issues, and if they take the time to vote, they do so based on whatever caught their eye.

But this concept doesn’t explain the folks who have the time and resources to be Very Online (and I count myself among them) and thus, also have the time to access to the whole world’s knowledge base and should by rights be “high information” voters. How is it that anyone can personally check the stock market tickers directly in just seconds, and we still have people claiming “fake news!” when someone posts about markets crashing?

The answer, I think, can be found in Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler’s short book, Useful Delusions; The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain.

The authors talk about how self-deception has actually been critical to our evolution. Roughly speaking, the first kind of self-deception is the kind required to do forward planning. In our hunter-gatherer days, the mammoth might not be right in front of us right now, but we can deceive ourselves temporarily to imagine that it is, and then plan how we might, as a group, take it down. Likewise, humans can’t fly like birds, but we can deceive ourselves temporarily to imagine ways in which we might fly, and thus invent things like airplanes.

The second kind of self-deception allows us to cope with our mortality. We are, as far as we know, the only creatures aware of our inevitable biological fates. Yet, we also have the same sort of visceral fear/survival instincts as our fellow critters. So, we come up with all sorts of mental coping mechanisms (those self deceptions) to allow us to live out our lives without losing our minds.

This vital ability, self-deception, also leads to our greatest follies. The ability to engage in self-deception can lead us straight into self-sabotaging outcomes. That’s why we continue to consume too much sugar when we know it’s harmful, why we persist in driving drunk even when people (including ourselves) are horrifically injured or killed because of it, and why we can be convinced to vote for destructive policies.

And it’s something that us (too often arrogant) self-proclaimed rationalists must start accounting for in politics. A quote, with italics added by myself for emphasis:

“Foregoing self-deception isn’t merely a mark of education or enlightenment — it is a sign of privilege. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Virgin Birth, it’s because your life does not depend on your believing such things. Your material, cultural, and social worlds are providing you with other safety nets for psychological and physical needs. But should your circumstances change for the worse, were the pillars of your life to buckle and sway, your mind, too, would prove fertile ground for the wildest self-deceptions. There are, as we say, no atheists in foxholes.” (page xvii).

The words cultural and social do a lot of heavy lifting in this quote, particularly as they pertain to political situations like the orange man. This is why his support crosses gender, income, and racial lines. Cultural and social norms, for some of those supporters, are changing — quite rapidly in their view — in ways that no longer provide them the safety nets for their psychological needs. Whether you liked or approved of the previous cultural or social or even economic norms they adhered to is irrelevant. The point you have to take note of here is that the self-deception they engage in is a kind of defensive mechanism against perceived threats to their way of life.

And in some cases self-deception applies to defending their physical needs too. Those folks who have seen good paying jobs disappear overseas, wages stagnate, or their lives otherwise degraded by corporate interests, pollution, or opioid addictions, or any of the other modern plagues. They’re angry about this and don’t know what to do about it.

Put another way: it’s hard, if not impossible, for the vast majority of people to have the time, capability, and willingness to understand why and how their lives are changing for what they believe is the worst. They will instead latch onto and cling to an explanation that makes the most sense and takes the least effort to hold.

It’s why the women who have been failed by modern medicine flock to ‘woo’ cures for their debilitating menopausal symptoms. It’s why the unemployed guy in the trailer who’s seen his friends die from fentanyl can easily be persuaded the brown folks brought the drugs in and took his job as well.

When these explanations are coupled with an us vs them ‘greater cause,’ like religious disputes, cold wars, cultural wars, or actual combat, they are infinitely harder to shake.

Another quote:

“It’s fine to hold secular, cosmopolitan views. But when rationalists look down on people who crave the hollow panaceas of tribe and nation, it’s like Marie Antoinette asking why peasants who lack bread don’t satisfy themselves with cake. They fail to grasp what life is like for most people on the planet.

People gain a sense of meaning and purpose when they submerge themselves in the myths, stories, and rituals of their tribes. In the face of impermanence and loss, our groups remind us that a form of immortality is within reach.” (page 171)

Not only have our current systems evolved to make it that much harder to have the time to understand anything, those same systems make it so much easier to find those ‘simple’ explanations as to why your life isn’t what you thought it would be.

People with vested interests in preserving the status quo (because they’re profiting handsomely off it) will happily supply lots of ‘easy’ explanations, usually in the form of scapegoating a minority. Further, our systems allow you to quickly find and fall in with people who cling to those same explanations. A tribe, in other words. A political tribe. A conspiracy theory tribe.

On social media in particular, the end result is that its much easier and more satisfying to post an opinion (or meme, or video, or article) and gain the approval (through ‘likes’ and supporting comments) of your self-selected peers than it is to research and fact check any of it. And being challenged by anyone just invokes the human tendency to get stubborn, lash out, and double down.

What can we do about this? The solution might be twofold.

First, we need to start meeting people where they are. Your elected officials should be expected to understand macroeconomic concepts like tariffs. That’s what we pay them to do! Crapping on the average Joe Citizen because he doesn’t understand these same concepts isn’t the way to go, though. Kindly explain, sure, if the situation allows. Point and laugh, no. That’ll just get the double down reaction I mentioned above.

Second, we need to offer people something better. At the societal level, we don’t have ‘good’ big causes. Much of Earth has been explored; what’s left, like the deepest ocean voyages, is accessible only to people with access to specialized equipment. And much of the era of exploration involved destroying the people and animals in the area of “discovery” anyway.

The space race is long since done, and wasn’t as unifying as the movies would have you believe. Climate change is a huge issue, to be sure, but unfortunately we’ve set a precedent where the most noble action available to the individual is to chuck something into a recycle bin (instead of say, join the tree planting corps in the wilds of Peru). Hard to write soul-stirring ballads about rinsing out that tin of beans.

We need big, positive visions of the future. Ones that find a way to include the people voting for the orange guy. Visions that allow everyone to be prosocial instead of self-sabotaging.

Visit the blog at Explaining the inexplicable.

Five Interesting Things #19

Time again for five interesting things: stuff you should know, stuff you might want to take action about, stuff you can share.

Flower power: Ever heard of phyto-mining? Or Phyto-remediation? It’s the process of using plants to extract things from the soil. New Scientist is reporting on an Albania start up farming plants to harvest carbon-neutral nickel from the soil while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Long distance repair: NASA successfully fixed Voyager 1… at a distance of 15 billion miles from Earth. If only service reps in my city were as good…

Should we call them chippers … instead of choppers? Quiet, electric helicopters are here at long last.

Steppe right up: Proof we can fix things when we try. The rare Przewalski’s Horse has returned to Kazakhstan, thanks to an initiative by the Prague Zoo to reintroduce the animal.

Mmmm: Healthier, more sustainable chocolate? Yes please!

Visit the blog at Five Interesting Things #19.

It’s time to “flood the zone” with truth

As I wrote in a previous piece, Steve Bannon’s playbook is: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Bannon’s strategy here, one employed with great success by Trump so far, is to disorient the public, destroy trust, and blitzkrieg the press (and social media) so no one knows what to focus on or fight. The idea is to scare you into staying home and keep you staring at your phone in horror.

Meanwhile, the broligarchy is also busy trying to erase history, by banning books, changing curriculum, and doing things like refusing to even display photos of accomplished women.

It’s long past time we stopped letting this happen. We can’t depend on corporate-owned media or social media to save us.

If the playbook is to “flood the zone with shit” then we need a concerted, coordinated effort by progressives and large progressive organizations to “flood the zone with truth.”

This is important because it will:

Counteract the “doomscroll” feeling on social media which leads to defeatismEnsures that there are multiple sources of truth so they can’t succeed in erasing facts and historyContinue to feed the multiple AI with facts, because we know they’re scraping social media to train these LLMs

For this to succeed all of the progressive organizations need to start publishing more content and encouraging people (like you) to post it on all social networks (including Twitter). The content needs to be about:

MOST IMPORTANT: Signal boost what people and organizations are doing to fight back so that we know what’s being done (and where we can help). Change the doomscroll to a very specific how to get organized scroll. People need to know what to do.Facts about climate change, history, and social justicePump stories of people succeeding in pushing backWhat other countries are doing to fight climate change and advance progress because there’s more to the world than the USFact checking online trolls instead of depending on the platforms to do it

We also need the financing and backing of progressive billionaires (like Mark Cuban), perhaps even to engage bot farms of our own to push this stuff out there. 

We need high profile celebrities to push this stuff too. 

If you agree, share this with your networks, with progressive organizations, tag important people with it online.

Visit the blog at It’s time to “flood the zone” with truth.

The grey goo scenario is happening

In 1986, a fellow by the name of K. Eric Drexler wrote a book called Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. What got a lot of hype at the time was a small section describing the potential for a catastrophic scenario, where tiny self-replicating machines could get out of control and consume all of the world’s biomass. Technically called ecophagy, the media latched onto another term coined by Drexler for the problem: grey goo.

Thirty-eight years later, grey goo is here and it is consuming the world. It’s just not what we thought it would be.

We know it by the horrendous term, “content.”

“Content” is produced by corporations that are mining universes like Star Wars and Marvel and spinning out whole plodding series on the thinnest of premises.

It’s churned out by studios in the form of endless reboots and remakes.

You can find it in music where you have producers heavily “sampling” older riffs, or doing covers and tributes, pushing out remasters or the same pieces stamped into different physical media.

In the book world, it’s the endless “retellings” of old tales.

In video games, it’s the casual gachas, the idle miners, the merge puzzles. Mindless diversions. Tap. Repeat. Tap. Repeat.

And it’s not confined to media.

You can find it in the grocery stores where in one aisle you have Greek-style pizza and in another aisle you have Greek salad with pizza-flavoured pita chips. Or that product category known as “all-dressed” which is another way of saying “we sprayed it with every simulated flavour we had.”

Even our cities, at least in North America, are monotonously same-y. The same franchise restaurants. The same clothing outlets. The half dozen styles of cars in the parking lot, painted in mostly dull colours.

Everything is converging into mushy sameness.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with remixes, mashups, blends etc. But our reimaginings have been increasingly light on the imagining and heavy on the re for a very long time.

And now we are also awash in AI slop, in which the corporations have hoovered up all the available material — with or without creator permission — and devised programs that allow anyone to use the program crank out more “content.” The AI we’re getting is anything but intelligent. It’s predictive text on steroids, incapable of understanding what its producing: soulless, unoriginal, bland, and extremely hazy on the details. And as the Internet fills up with more of this slop, crowding out anything new, interesting, or original, the content sampling machine will be hoovering up it’s own slop and then producing… well, sloppier slop.

Yet corporations are already laying off their creative staff, turning to AI in the hopes of cranking out even more slop even faster.

The grey goo that eats the world.

And you and I, the consumers, are finding it increasingly hard to escape.

Have you noticed the shrinking importance of search? I know that something like Netflix must have a catalogue of thousands of titles, but I have to hunt for the search function in the interface and I have to know what I am looking for and type it laboriously with my remote. Otherwise, I am served the same twenty or thirty items just reshuffled under different labels like Watch Together or Bingeworthy or the ubiquitous Recommended for You.

Why is it recommended for you? Because every single click, every single pause in the scrolling, accidental or intended, every single reaction emoji … all of it has been an A/B test, designed to learn to serve you more and more of the same mush. Not because it’s good, and especially not because it’s good for you, mentally, emotionally, or intellectually.

It’s about engagement, which is a euphemism for being hooked.

Hooked by reels. Stories. Shorts. Serials. Smaller and smaller slices of content to keep you from noticing how much time is actually passing and to keep you consuming.

This steady diet of grey goo has turned us into rats, mindlessly pressing the lever for a reward. It’s collectively dulling our ability to do much more than spit out hot takes and snark, or slavishly repeat catch phrases we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s got what plants crave.

It has eroded our ability to focus and think which were — when you look at the totality of human history — seriously underdeveloped traits to begin with. And it couldn’t be happening at a worse time, as we collectively face some of our biggest, most complicated problems.

Not only are we suffering from a failure of imagination when it comes to coming up with solutions, some of us are being radicalized — by endless repetition of lies and half-truths into fighting against the very changes that would make life better for all us.

Is there a conspiracy to keep us stupid? Maybe. Bread and circuses has long been a strategy of the ruling class to keep the masses distracted. And certainly the people intent on banning books and muzzling teachers are happy enough with this state of affairs. Or perhaps this is just a natural consequence of a system that’s evolved to optimize for profit over every single possible public good.

It really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that we stop letting it happen.

Visit the blog at The grey goo scenario is happening.

A very moving experience

Seven words I’ve come to dread and loathe: “Hey! What are you doing this weekend?”

Why? I’ve come to realize that these words are never followed up by suggestions of fun activities like golf games, ski trips, dinner theatre and so on. When people want to do things like this they phrase the question more specifically as in: “Hey! Wanna watch the hockey game on a 75″ screen at my house this weekend?”

When they are vague, you want to run the other way as quickly as your little legs can carry you. This is because those seven words are actually code for: “Hey! I’m moving this weekend and I need some suckers, er, volunteers to help!”

I don’t mind lending a hand, really I don’t. It’s just that helping people move is Good Intention Paving Stone #28 on the Road to Hell.

First of all, Moving Day nearly always has to start at the crack of dawn. Since I am not a member of that sub-species known as the Early Riser, this is not a good start. In fact, I sincerely believe that all generals throughout history who said things like “We attack at dawn!” should have been summarily shot, just on principle.

Another Moving Day rule appears to be that the weather must be bad. It can be clear skies and warm temperatures for days before and after, but on Moving Day itself, the temperature will drop to -50 degrees. Kelvin. It will also A) Rain, B) Snow C) Hail or D) All of the above, with cats and dogs thrown in for good measure.

Upon arrival at the soon-to-be-vacant residence, you will discover that your friend hasn’t begun packing yet. I usually anticipate this and bring about six months worth of old newspapers with me. I also bring a pair of gloves, because as someone who did time in the newspaper business, I have memorized this little known fact: newspaper ink only adheres to newsprint for about three minutes after it is published. After that, ink molecules actually jump off the surface of the paper and stick to the nearest object. (This is a survival method ink molecules use to prevent certain death in recycle bins and kitty litter boxes.)

After you finish packing, you will suddenly realize that your friend currently lives on the top floor of a 20-floor apartment building. This wouldn’t be so bad if the service elevator didn’t have a carrying capacity limit of 75.8 pounds. The bright side is that you will be able to skip your StairMaster workout for the next four years.

Once everything is packed, it’s usually smooth sailing from there… unless your friend is anal-retentive enough to frown on chucking furniture off the balcony. Actually, most furniture is easily moved, even if you have to do it the traditional way. Dishes can be put in boxes, tables can have leaves removed and beds can be dismantled.

There is always one difficult piece though: The Sofa.

I have a theory about sofas. I firmly believe that they are scientifically designed to absorb water from the air so that their size increases over time. I say this because even though the owner assures you the sofa came into the building with no problems, it never, ever fits through these same doorways, elevator shafts and stairwells. And if they didn’t like the balcony suggestion, the owner is likely to get quite testy about cutting off bits of sofa as the situation calls for it.

Once you have everything downstairs, it will turn out that the pickup truck your friend had borrowed for the occasion will not start. This means you will have to make 87 trips across town with furniture stuffed into his Honda Civic. Believe it or not, this is the time you want to wish for bad weather, because freezing rain will shellac a sofa onto the roof of a Civic very neatly. And in a pinch, broken light bulbs make great icepicks.

Provided you don’t lose anything in traffic, and the owner has actually got the right date for taking possession of his new residence, you can start moving things in. At this point it is revealed that he is moving onto the roof of a 35 floor apartment, and that while this service elevator has a larger carrying capacity, it is only available on Tuesdays between 3 and 4 a.m.

If you manage to get everything moved in less than 24 hours and with a minimum of broken bones, you will now get a hearty thanks from your friend. This is the time you want him or her to be vague. Yes indeedy, you want to hear something really indefinite and open-ended.

Something like… “Hey! If you ever need a favour, gimme a call, okay?”

Oh yes, I’ll be calling. Count on it.

Visit the blog at A very moving experience.

Only Disconnect

As kids, my friends and I used to complain about having to learn — and worse, memorize — things because we could just “look them up.” It seemed like such a waste of time. It was all right there.

I should contextualize this (and date myself in the process) by saying that this was pre-Internet. So, “looking things up” meant using a physical set of books. Sometimes this meant digging through the nonfiction section of the library, sometimes it meant using the encyclopedia.

I was lucky enough to have a set of encyclopedia in my house; not the venerable Britannica, but some other kind whose name escapes me just now. I remember that they were dark blue with gold-lettered spines, and each volume had a satisfying heft in my twelve-year-old hands.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that those encyclopedia, and the dictionary, and the library, and the independent bookstores, represented what felt like a core of generally accepted Knowledge with a capital K. Publishers still employed fact-checkers, and the authors were usually subject matter experts. There was a sense that there was consensus about reality and objective truth.

If someone came up to you and said something like gravity doesn’t exist, or germs aren’t real… you’d have smiled uneasily and backed away slowly because you knew otherwise. You felt like you had a firmer grip on things than the fellow in front of you.

Also, at that time, it still felt like we had Institutions with a capital I (government, school, church etc.). And there was that brief, sweet window in the 80s and 90s where, for some groups of people hitting mid career or just coming of age, everything seemed awesome. It was post Cold War, there was little chance of being drafted or conscripted, and no major conflicts on home turf. There was a solidity to it all. And like the song said, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.”

That wasn’t the objective truth, of course. That consensus I referenced was actually just the worldview of older white men steeped in colonialism. Gatekeeping, institutionalized racism, and rampant misogyny were the rule, not the exception. We know now that those Institutions we trusted were engaged in horrible behaviours, everything from medical experiments on people of colour, to the systemic destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures, to criminalizing sexuality.

While there technically wasn’t a draft after the Vietnam War, for anyone trying trying to escape their socioeconomic circumstances, the US GI Bill — military service in exchange for college degree support — was one of the few pathways out. We were very busy polluting the crap out of everything (remember acid rain, the ozone layer, the Exxon Valdez, and of course, all those greenhouse gasses.)

And finally, the pace of discovery wherein even what we believed were objective facts (Pluto’s status as a planet, anyone?) were changing, and that meant that those solid, hefty, and super expensive to print encyclopedia were now becoming rapidly outdated.

All of which is to say that while those years probably felt idyllic to some, they were not, and there were very good reasons for proceeding with ‘disruption,’ to use the Silicon Valley term. A lot of things needed to be broken up, dismantled, rejigged. The old days were not ‘better.’ Change is good.

One of the best things the Internet has since facilitated is the democratization of many things, including publishing. With a relatively modest amount of money, almost everyone can publish regardless of gender, ethnicity, location, and reach a large number of people.

But fast forward to the sort-of-post-pandemic era, and the ground under our feet does not feel… solid. At all.

What the pandemic and it’s cascading consequences have brought into sharp focus is how broken all of our systems have become in a very short time. For example, those pandemic and climate change-related shut downs have made us realize how many of our supply chains are dependent on a very small number of mega producers, thanks to mergers and consolidation.

Tech companies make billions in profits and yet still lay off staff. Grocery chains make billions in profits and blame the inflation they helped cause for the prices they set.

Up is down.

Work for many has gone from being 9-5 with occasional overtime to being always on call, without the standby pay. Wage growth has stagnated and unions are struggling to remain effective. Our evenings and weekends are desperately overscheduled and we revenge procrastinate ourselves into sleep deprivation. Dealing with what should be minor inconveniences like a busted appliance turn into energy-sapping and frustration-inducing weeks-long sagas because of corporate malfeasance.

We’ve been systematically and deliberately hooked on social media. Kids who once got nights-and-weekends breaks from petty schoolyard dramas are now living them 24/7 in chat apps and videos. We adults spend our waking hours mindlessly doomscrolling, sometimes finding ourselves lead by the almighty algorithm into some dark, dark, rabbit holes.

When we’re not consuming, we’re performing. Living with other humans has always been performative, of course, but now we’re doing it at scale. Everyone is compelled to render an opinion on everything for the likes and follows. Expertise is not only no longer valued, its actively laughed at, with the average Joe Blow who skipped science class in high school somehow thinking he knows better than someone who spent years earning a PhD in a complicated subject Joe has never even heard of before.

Worse, some people with genuine credentials have found the siren call of the grift too hard to resist, because the Internet makes it easy to get famous being a ‘contrarian’ and then they can sell you something.

Indeed, one of the worst things the Internet has since facilitated is the democratization of many things, including publishing. Anyone can publish the most unhinged thing they can think of, and reach a large number of people, quickly.

And now the robots are publishing too, solemnly advising people to put glue on their pizza or to eat poisonous mushrooms. People are being suckered by AI slop, which includes ‘images’ of historic events that never happened, or deep fake videos.

And so baseline for anyone post Gen-X is a world that’s almost entirely digital, and therefore ephemeral. That link that once explained the functions of a cell has been bought by some dudebro who’s using it to hawk cryptocurrency schemes and NFTs. Wikipedia pages can be edited to soft-peddle fascism. Any one with some free time and a bit of tech know-how can put together a super convincing website, a video, a persuasive meme. Any one keen to put food on the table can be made to pump out disinformation by the gigabyte.

What’s real, what’s true, what’s the consensus on reality? If you weren’t paying attention in school, or if your schools were crap, who knows? As a society, we are ridiculously under-equipped in critical thinking skills.

Left is right. Dark is light.

Add to this: We’re encouraged to drink coffee and energy drinks by the bucket-sized cup, and we get anxious and jittery; we’re pushed to whiplash between super pious ‘dry’ months and day drinking and we get depressed and ashamed.

Traditional publishers no longer worry “is this book or web article correct?” The only metric is “will it sell or bring clicks?” So we get sold dubious diets, and horrendous ‘methods‘ for relating to each other, and legions of ‘influencers’ with zero credentials encouraging people to believe woo over science.

The worst of our politicians are gas lighting the crap out of us, and their aggressively gullible followers happily parrot everything they say. And when they’re not gas lighting they’re rage-baiting.

Steve Bannon once said, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” And Jonathan Rauch nailed it: “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”

This is about disorientation.

Wrong is correct. Germs aren’t real. Gravity doesn’t exist.

Two legs good, four legs bad.

Is it any wonder you’ve been feeling so unmoored for so long?

At the height of the pandemic and the peak (trough!) of the Trump presidency, even the most seemingly stable, even keel, reliable people I knew were struggling not to lose their grip on reality. Some of them did lose it, and they haven’t come back.

The relentless pace of our daily lives, our personal dramas, the lingering aftershocks of the lockdowns, the ‘oh, what the fuck now?!’ politics, the stochastic terrorism. The increasing cost and scope of climate changed-fuelled disasters. The very real mental, physical, and economic damage of it all.

And here we are again, staring down the barrel of another Trump presidency, and the crazy making from that has already started.

It’s deja vu all over again. How do we get through it this time?

Here’s where I’m at:

The only winning move is not to play.

First, I’ll be regrounding myself in reality. Things I can see, things I can hear, and particularly, things I can touch. That means physical media (books, magazines, newspapers) over websites, in person socializing over Facebook. Moving more. Sitting less. Normalizing chronically offline.

And real self-care, not aftercare.

When I do have to go online, I will be blocking over ‘engaging.’ Ignoring over screenshotting, amplifying, and pearl clutching. I will not be giving the likes of Shapiro and Carlson or their many followers any more of my time. No more hot takes. No more brain rot.

I will no longer be a willing participant in Bannon’s shitshow. It’s time to unplug.

That’s not to say I’m disengaging or calling it a day. Far from it, because, as the saying goes, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

I will be boosting, amplifying and uplifting the people I know who are out there fighting the good fight. I’ll stay informed. I’ll be supporting indies over corporations whenever I can, especially the news media, because the corporate media is not our friend, it’s not even a neutral third party, and we really, really need to stop acting like it is.

But most importantly, I’ll be reclaiming my time to do the work.

Because there are three reasons for the disorientation campaign, you see.

One is to make strong, authoritarian types appealing. It’s chaos out here! Remember how it was better before? I’ll fix it!

Two is to hide the fact that it’s the strong, authoritarian types making it chaotic in the first place. Every accusation is a confession.

And three, the barrage of bullshit is to keep you so off balance you can’t fight back. Blitzkrieg.

Don’t let ’em do it this time.

Find your solid ground again, and hold it. Link hands with others doing the same. Help up those who can’t.

Good luck.

If you enjoy my writing, my latest book is here, and the purchase supports indie bookstores. You can find me on Bluesky.

Visit the blog at Only Disconnect.

Five Interesting Things #18

Welcome to my semi-regular Five post: five interesting, potentially actionable, shareable things.

Tiger tiger, burning bright… Apparently there are 7000 tigers living in private facilities in the US, which is more than the 5000 still left in the wild. If you’d like to do something about this, you can always adopt a tiger.

Connect the dots, er, tracks? Remember learning about continental drift? About 140 million years ago, what we think of as the Atlantic ocean didn’t exist, and South America was butted up against the continent of Africa. Over time, those continents drift apart. Now, researchers believe they’ve discovered matching trails of dinosaur footprints on either side of the Atlantic that were once the same trail.

Hippo-cratic oaths This is a great story about a monk who joined up with Hippo, a solar-powered boat to clean up the Bangkok river. What could you do to your local waterways?

Ice, ice, baby Could you use your future air conditioner as a battery? MIT thinks so. Storing cold at off peak hours might help reduce grid strain when it gets hot.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail. A longer, more philosophical piece about how to get unstuck. Grab your favourite beverage for this one and enjoy.

Visit the blog at Five Interesting Things #18.

A pain in the app

Dear Parent or Guardian,

We are reaching out today, on this perfectly viable communication method known as email, to let you know you have to download and install yet another app so that we can communicate with you.

This app replaces the one we insisted you download last year, TooCoolForSchool. Please note, we’ve heard the rumours and our decision to replace this app has nothing to do with the fact that its battery management configuration set four staff members’ phones on fire. It’s also definitely not the case that the principal called it a REDACTED, because that would have been inappropriate to say around children. In other news, Mr. Sampson has completely recovered from his burns and expects to be back in the office this week.

No, we are replacing the app because some jerk salesman upsold the ministry of education again we value you, the parents, and wish to be in constant communication with you. As such, please go to the app store and download TooSchoolForCool. To activate the app, please type in your child’s 25 digit student number, the middle three letters of their last name, and their teacher’s first name.

In order to facilitate communications, we will email you to tell you we’re going to send a message on the app, we’ll email you to tell you we have sent you a message on the app, and we’ll email you to remind you to check your app.

For your safety and security, every time you use the app, it will force you to go through a 2FA process. We don’t know what 2FA stands for either, but we do know that checking the little box that says “Trust This Device” will have absolutely no effect on the 2FA requirements. Ever. In fact, checking the box will erase your password immediately, and subsequently, you’ll have to go through three password resets to restore access, just so you can see that your kid ate apples for our Health Eating unit today.

Even though this new app comes with fancy features like Parental Permission 2.0, we will continue to send home paper forms photocopied on colours that make the print unreadable, and with lines too small to write anything on. We will email you to let you know to check the app for a message to remind you to check your child’s backpack, pockets, lunchbox, and left sock for the form. We apologize in advance that it will be crumpled and smell like overripe bananas, unless of course it’s already gone through the wash.

Oh, and this form will continue you ask you the questions you have answered six times this year already, including but not limited to:

Does your child have any allergies or health concerns?What is your email?Would you like to volunteer for this trip?What are your emergency contact details?Do we have permission to post your child’s picture on the social media accounts we’ve only updated twice in the last two years?Seriously, please volunteer for this trip, especially you, Martha, because your kid is a little hellion.What are your spouse or partner’s emergency contact details? We need to have something to ignore because we only send information to the woman of the house.

Please be advised that this app DOES NOT replace the diary app your child’s teacher also uses, Frugal Classroom, Homework Helpr, ELearnFacilitator, eezeeFUNDRAZOR, or the late bus notification app that always craps out when the weather gets bad or more than three people try to access it at once.

Finally, please note you will get a copy of each notification for each child you have in our school, as well as every child who has been through our school, even if they have now moved on to university, because no, we don’t know how to turn the damn notifications off either.

Yours in Education,

Ms. Nickelbrook

PS – We’re holding a fundraiser! This year, we will be selling phone battery replacements! Call in now to place your order!

Visit the blog at A pain in the app.