Group items tagged

megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.

World’s 'doomsday' clock will stay at three minutes to midnight

World’s 'doomsday' clock will stay at three minutes to midnight

The clock has been set at 11:57PM since January 2015, when it was moved down from five minutes to destruction. It's the closest the clock has been to midnight since the Cold War in the 1980s.

in recent years, personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats, from climate change to terrorism, cyberattacks and civil unrest.

John W. Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who spent years studying the myth that the world would end in 2012. He accused doomsday investors of hawking “survival porn,” which he described as a “hypermasculine fantasy” that danger is near and a select few will be able to save themselves and their families — if they are prepared.

“Fear sells even better than sex,” Professor Hoopes said. “If you can make people afraid, you can sell them all kinds of stuff,”

. The bad news is that a form of doomsday-machine politics — in which you threaten to blow up things that you care about, because you think your rivals care about them more — is playing out in Washington right now, courtesy of the Republican Party.

Doomsday-machine politics made its first U.S. appearance in the 1990s, when Republicans shut down the federal government in an attempt to extract concessions from Bill Clinton.

Republicans tried again, with more success, in 2011, using the threat of refusing to raise the debt ceiling — forcing the U.S. government into default, with possibly catastrophic effects on the world economy — to win policy concessions from Barack Obama.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

Bayes’ theorem is the foundation of the digital economy. It is what enables applications such as Google, Facebook and Instagram to use people’s personal data to predict what they will click on or buy, who they’ll swipe right on and who they’ll vote for

Predictions using Bayes’ theorem are probabilities, not certainties, yet they are worth billions to advertisers, because they are generally accurate.

In a 1993 article in the journal Nature, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III invoked math and population data to predict that the end is likely to come in under a thousand years

Humanity has had to cash in on its insurance policy earlier than expected.

Known as the "Doomsday Vault," this seed bank -- operated by the Norwegian government and containing a seed of just about every known crop in the world -- is meant to be humanity's backup in the event of a catastrophe that devastates crops.

The bloody conflict in Syria has left scientists at an important gene bank in Aleppo -- where new strains of drought- and heat-resistant wheat have been developed over time -- unable to continue their work in recent years.

few wrong ideas have been more persistent than the fear of too many people

In a famous 1980 wager, Simon bet an author of “The Population Bomb,” Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich, that resources would actually become more plentiful, not less, as the population grew

he won the bet: In a little more than 10 years, the price of a representative set of commodities fell by more than half — a clear signal that supply was outstripping demand.

By the time rioters ransacked the Capitol, the machinery of the left had already been primed to respond — prepared by months spent sketching out doomsday scenarios and mapping out responses, by countless hours of training exercises and reams of opinion research.

At each juncture, the activist wing of the Democratic coalition deployed its resources deliberately, channeling its energy toward countering Mr. Trump’s attempts at sabotage. Joseph R. Biden Jr., an avowed centrist who has often boasted of beating his more liberal primary opponents, was a beneficiary of their work.

Just as important, progressive groups reckoned with their own vulnerabilities: The impulses toward fiery rhetoric and divisive demands — which generated polarizing slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” — were supplanted by a more studied vocabulary, developed through nightly opinion research and message testing.

these fears can no longer be confined to a fanatical fringe of gun-toting survivalists. The relentless onslaught of earthshaking crises, unfolding against the backdrop of flash floods and forest fires, has steadily pushed apocalyptic sentiment into the mainstream. When even the head of the United Nations warns that rising sea levels could unleash “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it is hard to remain sanguine about the state of the world. One survey found that over half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”

At the same time, recent years have also seen the resurgence of a very different kind of narrative. Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better — and are likely to continue to do so in the future.

liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between

every two months, we lose more Americans to gun violence than we did in the 9/11 attacks

we lose some 2,800 children and teenagers to guns annually.

More than twice as many preschoolers die annually from gun violence in America as law enforcement officers are killed in the line of duty.

at every stage of our ongoing economic crisis — and in particular, every time anyone has suggested actually trying to do something about mass unemployment — a chorus of voices has warned that unless we bring down budget deficits now now now, financial markets will turn on America, driving interest rates sky-high. And these prophecies of doom have had a powerful effect on our economic discourse.

I and other economists argued from the beginning that these dire warnings of fiscal catastrophe were all wrong, that budget deficits won’t cause soaring interest rates as long as the economy is depressed — and that the biggest risk to the economy is that we might try to slash the deficit too soon. And surely that point of view has been strongly validated by events.

The key thing we need to understand, however, is that the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult. They are emotionally and professionally committed to the belief that fiscal crisis lurks just around the corner, and they will hold to their belief no matter how many corners we turn without encountering that crisis.

Conservative talk-show hosts, who stoke right-wing populism for a living, reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump’s campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that, “with the case of Trump, there’s a much bigger upside than downside.” In July, Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump.”

Even the most moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager, who have made careers of arguing that private character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Mark Levin, who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network, vowed not to. “Count me as Never Trump,” he declared in April. But in September he announced, “I’m voting for Trump.”

Among big-time national conservative talk-show hosts, Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership after Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn’t just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism.

Around the world, news organizations were struggling under the burden of translating the "colorful vernacular" that the American President had reportedly used to describe certain nations during Thursday afternoon's meeting about immigration reform.

If Trump is calling countries with black populations shitholes, it's because he sees them as cesspools of human excrement, the dark waste of the world -- a point made even uglier by his use of Norway, where over 90% of the population is white and three out of four people fit the Aryan blond and blue eyed ideal, as his example of a nation from which America should seek new immigrants.

There is no logical interpretation of Trump's words other than as an assertion of white supremacist purpose, in which he explicitly states what has been the implied core mission of Trumpism all along: To Make America White Again. (As I noted on Twitter in reaction to this: "If there were a Doomsday Clock for Trump blurting out the N-word in public, it would currently show two minutes to midnight.")

Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages

At the end of all their travels—after cataloging all the bedrock of the entire planet—they might finally be led to an odd, razor-thin stratum hiding halfway up some eroding, far-flung desert canyon

Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.

In an electorate that agrees on little, there is one thing that nearly every voter here in Southwest Wisconsin feels: Exhaustion.

That fatigue with politics, aimed primarily at President Donald Trump but also Democrats in Washington and the overall tone of discourse in America, is coursing through the minds of many voters in one of the most politically volatile parts of this swing state, where counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 swung substantially to Trump in 2016 before swinging back to Democrats and Gov. Tony Evers in 2018.

Wisconsin played a central role in Trump's victory in 2016, with rural and working class voters leading the rejection of Democrats throughout the Upper Midwest.

NAIROBI — The top headline last week on a popular Kenyan news website could barely contain its sarcasm: "America, with 270K deaths, 13M infections, warns citizens not to travel to Kenya over high risk of COVID-19."

To many here, American fears of catching the coronavirus in Africa seem particularly ludicrous.

Almost every one of the continent’s 54 countries, while home to some of the least developed health-care systems in the world, have registered fewer deaths from the virus in the last nine months than the United States now suffers per day.

Facebook’s hypocrisies, and its hunger for power and market domination, are not secret. Nor is the company’s conflation of free speech and algorithmic amplification

But the events of January 6 proved for many people—including many in Facebook’s workforce—to be a breaking point.

these documents leave little room for doubt about Facebook’s crucial role in advancing the cause of authoritarianism in America and around the world. Authoritarianism predates the rise of Facebook, of course. But Facebook makes it much easier for authoritarians to win.

As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.”

Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.