Category Archives: society

Purpose and meaning

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My son recently got into photography, and, as those things usually go, he started experimenting with film, since he heard all kinds of stuff on the Internet and wanted to check it out for himself. My reaction was “wait, film is actually still being used?” The last time I checked, Kodak went bankrupt and stopped producing film altogether, Fuji left the film market, and when I did my last experiment with film you could no longer get anyone to process E6 properly, and the best you could do was get some of the C41 emulsions that were still being produced (mostly Kodak Ektar and Portra and Fuji Reala), develop it in some rare places that still do it, and then either have it scanned in their Frontier minilab (to your detriment), or try to do it yourself, and good luck with that since film scanners were basically an extinct species at that point. Since the result of my experiment was that a 12MP m43 digital camera matched Mamiya 645 medium format with Fuji Reala negatives in resolution, and handily beat it in dynamic range and colour quality, I decided that film is not worth the hassle anymore, put the film gear in a drawer and thought that was it. However, it appears that the film market was having some kind of a resurgence – it’s mostly because of the motion pictures industry that started using it with some regularity again, and those C41 emulsions are being packaged in 35mm and medium format rolls, and black and white film was never much impacted by the move to digital. Also, there’s a surprising amount of activity around film, but when I looked into it, I was shocked that I couldn’t find good examples of film photography online anymore. Almost every example of pictures taken with film that I could find online looked like absolute garbage. I was like “that can’t be right, there has to be someone who shoots film because it’s beautiful”, but if there are such examples I couldn’t find them under the pile of all the hipster lomo garbage. I literally had to use my old film scans in order to show my son what film colours are supposed to look like when everything is done right – fresh film of good quality processed in good chemicals and scanned on a proper scanner. I literally couldn’t find an example of EBX online that isn’t cross-processed in C41 chemicals or developed in cat piss and scanned by a webcam or something, pretending it’s art. My first thought was “why do the film photographers put up with this”, but then I realized: they are actually actively looking for that, and when I saw a “film emulation” plugin for Lightroom that emulates the results of poor scanning, it became clear: people think film looks like shit, and they actively seek out this as a result, thinking it’s “nostalgic”. They actually want it to look washed out with colours that look like a result of age-fading for decades in some drawer. They don’t try to make film look good, because that look is perceived as “digital”. Not just that, but they are so obsessed with the “look”, that they completely neglect the photography itself, thinking that the “look” itself is somehow “art”, and when you look past the fact that the photo is taken on a poorly processed colour negative, there’s hardly anything there. A house, a street corner, a garage door. It’s all generic, stereotypical, vacuous and meaningless. Sure, most of everything used to be that way because most photographers used to follow trends and copy the things they saw somewhere without really understanding what made it good, but I think it’s even worse now, probably because poor results get applauded in some online echo-chamber and this amplifies the noise and kills the signal if there ever was any.

I continued to explore the technical part of what they are doing today, and found out that scanning, as expected, is a problem, because they are still using the same scanners that were current when I used to shoot film, but those are aging out of their life span and people are figuring out new methods, and the best one is to basically put film on a lightbox, and take a picture of it with a good digital camera with a macro lens. The detail captured is pretty much on par with film scanners, and the colours are in fact better. Then I asked myself the obvious question – why not just use the digital camera in the first place? And then it started dawning on me: that would be easy. That would skip over all those artificially introduced problems. It would reveal the fact that the photographer doesn’t actually know what he wants to do, has no ideas or goals in his work, and hides this under all the artificial problems created by using a completely fake technological process that pretends to be authentic, the way vinyl records mastered from digital files are a fake process pretending to be authentic.

Then I went deeper, trying to figure out why people create artificial problems for themselves and then whine as they solve them – it’s not just photography; I saw people heating their house with a wood stove or have an old car that keeps breaking down so that they have to fix it, and in general create all kinds of problems for themselves, and then solve those unnecessary problems in order to pretend that there’s something going on in their lives.

And there it is: they create fake problems for themselves because there is nothing else. The real problems are completely beyond their ability to solve, and the lack of smaller, solvable problems reveals the fact that their lives are empty and meaningless, and they are trying to bury this realization under all kinds of artificially created clutter.

Here’s where I really started thinking, because I remembered that experiment with a mouse utopia, where the scientists created an environment where mice will have absolutely everything they need, and the mice soon started acting in all kinds of dysfunctional and self-destructive ways, and their “civilization” collapsed in a very ugly way. The phenomenon became known as a behavioural sink, and humans seem to manifest the same patterns. When they lack obvious obstacles and problems to overcome in their daily lives, they reveal their existence as meaningless and start circling the drain.

Apparently, everybody needs to have a sense of a “mission”, a grand over-arching purpose of civilization and society, in which they partake by living their daily lives. If there’s no mission, and the problems they face daily are too easy and trivial, both mice and people go insane.

So, what’s the mission?

That’s an interesting question, because the same question seems to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. The mission was initially obvious – Rome was threatened by the Gauls, by Carthage, by all kinds of powerful neighbours. However, as Rome grew stronger, all those threats were eliminated, and as there were no obvious threats, and there were centuries of peace, people had enough time to think about what was the whole point, and the answer was no longer apparent. People started doing all kinds of extreme stuff to fill the spiritual void created by the fact that there was no longer an obvious problem their existence was meant to solve.
This is why Christianity took over the Rome like a wildfire. Christianity introduced a new mission. The physical life is merely an entrance exam for the true life that is beyond it, and what we do in life is a choice for either God or vanity, for eternity or nothingness. This is a mission, an over-arching mission that saturated both civilization and individual lives with meaning, the same kind of mission that made the Egyptians build the pyramids. They probably thought they were building the mirror image of the Orion’s belt on Earth, and as such they were building a portal into the afterlife, merging Heaven and Earth. Similarly, the Christians of the “dark age” thought they were building Heaven on Earth, living the Augustinian God’s Kingdom on Earth. However, for some reason this sense of mission wore out, probably because they neglected the things of this world to the point where they were philosophically vulnerable to modernity and humanism, which pointed out that science should be applied to produce technologies that improve daily lives of people. At some point, modernism took over from religion, and the idea of conquering the world with science and technology and creating a modernist technological utopia became the dominant over-arching purpose.

This made complete sense when there were entire continents to be conquered and colonized, but we quickly ran out of those. Then we started “conquering” wastelands like Mt Everest and Antarctica, where “to conquer” no longer meant to go and live there, but to go in and out quickly before you die from hypoxia and hypothermia. “Conquering space” first meant to put something into orbit, then to put a man there for a few orbits, then to put a man on the Moon for a short period. However, the pattern soon started to emerge: space is even more hostile than the worst, most hostile and uninhabitable places on Earth. If you put a man in orbit for a year or so, his health degrades significantly. If you put a man on the Moon, radiation will quickly kill him, not to mention that there’s literally nothing there to sustain human life – it all needs to be brought from Earth, at great cost and literally zero benefit, because there’s nothing on the Moon. If Antarctica is undesirable as a place for human settlement, Moon is even more so; Antarctica at least has breathable atmosphere and radiation shielding. So, what’s there in space after the Moon? Mars? Let’s see: corrosive soil that is hostile to life, thin unbreathable atmosphere, no radiation shielding, already lost its atmosphere once to solar wind because it has no magnetosphere, and it’s even more expensive to get there than to the Moon. Also, there’s absolutely nothing there worth getting. What’s next? The satellites of the gas giants? Far from the Sun, so insufficient heat. Some have water. None have breathable atmosphere. Extremely hard and expensive to get to. Also, there’s nothing there.

Planets around other stars? Sure, if you have faster-than-light travel, but speed of light is very slow and it seems to be an insurmountable barrier for our technology. However, even if you get there, what evidence is there of places that are hospitable to human life? None. For all we know, the planets are all as inhospitable as Jupiter, Mars, Venus or the rocky bodies, and the star systems are mostly non-unary, which means stars orbiting the barycentre, often creating 3+ body problems of chaotic orbits, and squeezing each other tidally to produce extreme coronal mass ejections that sterilize the planets periodically. In order to realistically colonize something outside the Solar system, and not just go somewhere else to die, you’d need FTL travel that allows you to inspect a vast number of star systems quickly in order to filter out the inadequate ones. That’s completely beyond the reach of our technology, either now or in a foreseeable future.

Also, science fizzled out. It promised a lot, but the curve of progress flat-lined decades ago, and there’s nothing going on other than marketing for industry and politics, because science is currently a marketing brand rather than a method. Science no longer promises great things, and even if it does, people don’t really believe it.

So, let’s summarize this before it turns into another book. In the Ancient Egypt, the Grand Mission was to connect Heaven and Earth, to build a portal between the world of the living and the world of the dead. After that failed, their civilization fizzled out. With Rome, the Grand Mission was to build a huge empire to protect themselves and project their image upon the world. After that succeeded, everything felt empty and people tried to fill this emptiness with all kinds of crazy behaviours, until Christianity gave them another Grand Mission: create the world in the image of God, and choose an eternal afterlife in God. At some point, this fizzled out, and science offered the next Grand Mission: master the physical world, conquer the world, then the Solar System, then colonize the nearby star systems, and create a Galactic Empire, and maybe become Masters of the Universe. That went great until people landed on the Moon, but the next step never came, and as our space exploration atrophied, and our efforts turned to all kinds of navel-gazing, culminating with the Internet, people in general feel there’s no Grand Mission at all, no point to Everything, and thus no point to anything, and if they face this outright, they go insane like the mice in their behavioural sink utopia. And so, in order not to go crazy, they create fake problems for themselves, like living in some wasteland on primitive resources in order to keep themselves busy with survival despite not needing to, or doing photography with film, or maintaining an oldtimer car that keeps breaking down, or doing Christmas every year, where they pretend it’s something meaningful to do, spend all the money, get annoyed by the family and relatives, get fat from too much food and hung over from too much alcohol, and depressed in early January when all that shit passes and they are left with more debt, more lard on their arse, and meaninglessness of their lives staring at them from the abyss of the future. So, what do they do? Invent fake goals, create non-existent problems that require fixing, and make everything worse so that they could feel they have a purpose in making things better again.

There’s obviously a real problem underneath all the dysfunction, and it needs to be addressed, not just covered up with pointless nonsense. To me, the answer is obvious. The purpose and the point of our existence is not in this world, it’s on the other side. If this life is to have a purpose at all, it is to get to the other side safely, without leaving pieces behind, and by choosing the right kind of spiritual existence for ourselves, the kind we would actually want to have forever. St. Augustine was right all along; it’s just that people got side-tracked by materialism, which hijacked science and turned it into a false theology. God is still the Eternity which we are trying to reach, by following the Ariadne’s thread of God’s presence through the labyrinth of the world. That is the Way, for both the civilisation, and the individual person.

Prepping mistakes

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I’ve been looking at some YouTube videos about prepping, and oh boy, is there some super stupid stuff out there. It’s no wonder people think of the whole thing with disdain. But let me share some of my impressions.

The actual “preppers” seem to be the ones offering the most impractical, immoderate and outright foolish advice out there. Basically, it’s the guys with a huge house, multiple acres of land around it, who are living out the fantasy of surviving apocalypse by returning to a combination of 18th century technology and Robinson Crusoe-esque approach. Their advice on how to prepare for a power outage is to store a year’s worth supply of gas canisters, gasoline and all sorts of gadgets, plus solar panels, generators etc. My reaction to this is a facepalm, thinking about how useless this advice is to an average urban person with a two bedroom flat, no particular storage space available and with only a parking place in front of the building, without a garage. Mind you, that’s how most of the world actually lives. No, you can’t have livestock, chickens or grow crops there. You also can’t store much of redundant supplies. You don’t have a secondary location to bug out to, because if you did, you’d probably be there already.

The second group are the people who regularly have hurricanes, tornadoes or similar natural disasters in their area, and who already have regular experience with conditions that require them to be able to ride it out on their own. They usually also have a large house with land, but they aren’t preparing for an imaginary scenario, they are preparing for a realistic scenario they already experienced, sometimes regularly, and so they know exactly what they are talking about and you should pay attention. Unfortunately, their advice usually assumes you also have a large house, a garage, plentiful storage space and a piece of land. That makes some of their recommendations inapplicable to average urban people.

The third group are the people who are already choosing or are forced to rough it out on a daily basis. This includes hikers, mountaineers, hunters and homeless people (for instance, someone living in a camper van or a trailer). They are forced to be space and weight efficient, either because they have to carry the stuff on their back, or because they live in an extremely confined space where storage space is at even more of a premium than it is to an average person. Also, their life depends on not screwing it up – take too much, you’re screwed, don’t take enough, you’re screwed. Insulate too much and you suffocate, don’t insulate enough and you freeze. They are forced to be extremely practical, and they will use the most modern gear available if it increases their odds, and they will also use the most generic stuff available if it does the job.

The fourth group are the survivalists and bushcrafters. They will try to approximate stone age conditions, use mostly the tools and materials that can be scavenged or harvested from the environment, and they will light a fire with almost nothing, just to show off. While this is definitely something to be aware of as a possibility, because you can never guarantee to be able to access everything you need and it’s good to have some ideas on how to improvise solutions, this bushcrafting/survivalist approach is something you adopt when you’re about to die, and then you do in fact die. This makes it something to avoid resorting to at all cost if any other solution is available.

The fifth group is something I actually haven’t watched on YouTube – it’s the experience of people who actually survived wars, regular power outages and all kinds of shit. It’s the people who know what a kerosene lamp smells like and what kind of light it produces and what a pain in the ass it is to read under it, as you try to reduce boredom in a shelter while your back yard is under a combined sniper/mortar fire.

While all of the above is informative in some way, I would recommend absolutely not taking seriously any advice outside of groups that actually had real life experience with adverse conditions. This means you want to listen to the homeless guy who lives in a camper van, the family who has to improvise their way through a hurricane season each year, a hiker/hunter who has to figure out how to make it on a multiple day trip in adverse weather/terrain conditions, and someone who survived the siege of Sarajevo or Vukovar. Everybody else is full of shit.

Avoid stupid ideas, such as improvised fire making, cooking solutions that will get you killed indoors, or things that would require you to do them in an open unheated space during the winter. Avoid things that have unrealistic or unsurvivable implications. Learn from the experience of people who actually had to figure it out and who had to find something that’s practical, convenient, cheap, and just works, and you can pull it off in a camper van. Also, the war/siege survivors; what they wished they had, what they had that was super useful, and what got people killed.

Your most likely scenario to prepare for is a week-long lockdown with power outages that can last a day, maybe two. Also, scenarios where the gas grid is out, gas stations are overcrowded and there are limitations and curfews imposed, there are power reductions, and the water is occasionally cut off for up to half a day. This is realistic and believe it or not I already had all of that at some point or another. It was very rarely or never all at the same time – basically, you have water, but no electricity, or you have water and electricity but the stores are empty and the fuel is rationed, or you have everything but there’s a lockdown and you can’t access anything outside of your home, or everything basically works but there’s a mass panic that brought the communications down and people are out in the streets, freaked out and sometimes violent. I personally survived hyperinflation, failed economy/country, war, earthquake and two pandemic scares (one was a smallpox scare in Yugoslavia, the other was recent). If you think that stuff doesn’t happen or doesn’t concern you, good for you I guess, but where I live power outages that last half a day are something that happens quite regularly, and last year we had water outages that lasted half a day too, because the water grid was being worked on. In my previous place, I survived a pretty major earthquake, but the building was structurally damaged and we eventually had to evacuate. The kind of prepping I’m talking about is not about doomsday, it’s about survivable inconveniences that can turn quite bad if you’re completely unprepared for them, or you mishandle things in stupid ways. The biggest boon I had from prepping was that I already went through scenarios ahead of time and when shit happened, I was calm when neighbours were in shock and panicking. This psychological effect can’t be overstated. Overreacting or underreacting to a situation can create serious trouble from something that could have been a minor inconvenience. For instance, overreacting to a power outage by making a charcoal fire indoors can get you killed or set your place on fire, when you could have had a butane camping stove and a cartridge at the ready, made some tea by the battery light and had fun times with your family. The attitude that shit just happens and it’s normal can be one of your major assets, while people who expect everything to be fine will freak themselves out.

On compassion and kindness

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I am so annoyed by stupid, superficial, arrogant and godless people on the Internet who pose as “compassionate” and “kind”, but who are in fact everything but. Honestly, I don’t think they would be able to recognise actual kindness and compassion if they saw it; in fact, I think they would condemn it as some kind of evil.

It’s actually very hard for me to define kindness. I can recognise it when I see it, but definitions are tricky, as they have to be accurate, specific and exclusive – basically, they need to say what something is, but not by being so broad they are useless. They need to exclude all the similar things something is not. In this case, a definition of compassion needs to exclude all the things that look like compassion, but are in fact not.

So, let me think about it. Compassion is samyama on a person. If I had to explain it to a non-yogi, I’d say samyama is to “grok” something or someone, to understand the inner nature of a thing or a person by means of being. Kindness is now easy to define; from a state of compassion, kindness is to give someone that which he needs to become more of self; to exceed limitations and attain realisation of one’s true nature (or, should I say, attain realisation of God’s true nature). Kindness, in essence, is what a bodisattva or a dakini does and you are awakened from an illusion and prodded forward on a path toward buddhahood.

Making “poor you, I’m so sorry for your predicament” statements is neither compassion nor kindness. It’s a manifestation of narcissism, nothing more. You just wish to be seen by others as a good and compassionate person, in a value-system where those are desirable qualities that elevate one’s social standing. People making such statements don’t really care if they actually helped someone; they just want to be seen as well-meaning and helpful, and in reality they never touch the actual person they are talking to, nor would they wish to. It’s like one of those formal greetings, where you say “how do you do” and you don’t really care, nor do you expect an answer.

I think it’s the problem with the Internet; it empowers poseurs and sociopaths to an extreme. It rewards people for making statements and gestures, that don’t necessarily have to be backed by anything real. Sure, things of this kind existed since forever, but an inherently superficial environment really encourages them.

What’s the difference between a compassionate person and a poseur? Well, a compassionate person sees someone with a problem, feels personally touched by it and drawn to act, and does something very real to help the person. For instance, see someone you used to know who fell on hard times, so you do very concrete things to help them – give them a place to stay, buy them clothes, find them work to do so they can earn money, basically help them end the downward spiral and reverse the negative trend of their life. You can’t really solve anyone’s problem, but you can buy them an opportunity to do it themselves. That’s what compassion and kindness are. What’s the fake thing that postures like the real thing in order to get social points? Mother Theresa. She didn’t solve anyone’s problem, nor did she even try to. She basically faked compassion in order to be thought of as a saint by other people, but she didn’t actually help the people she supposedly helped. Everything she did was for self-aggrandisement only, and it worked; she is generally recognised by people as an icon of compassion or whatever.

Internet is full of people like that; judgmental, self-centred ego-trippers, who always know the right thing to say to make them look good. How can you tell a fake from a real one? See how they deal with the “nazis”, the “tax collectors”, the people their ideology demonises. An excellent example is a black musician who heard about the KKK racists, and didn’t like the idea of being judged and rejected by someone for things that had absolutely nothing to do with him as a person, so he basically went there and talked to the KKK leaders, and eventually befriended them to the point where they renounced their former ideology, which they could no longer espouse in clear conscience. A poseur will call everybody a “nazi” because that’s what you do if you want to pose as someone who’s “a good one”, on the opposite side of a nazi, and would immediately reject a person for a mere suspicion of embracing an ideology that’s not the left of Chairman Mao, thus indicating that he’s so extremely “left”, that anything less than absolute extremism on the leftist spectrum is a “nazi” to him.

What is my recommendation here? Well, stop rewarding worthless people with positive social score just because they make extremist statements of virtue-signalling. Stop assuming someone means well and is a good person because he said all the “compassionate” words, such as congratulating people on apparently good things and telling them how sorry he is when something apparently bad happens. How about putting all such people in a spam filter and completely ignoring them, because that’s what they actually deserve. They are like those people Jesus talked about, who make everyone know when they do something pious or charitable, because what they are actually after is social approval and elevated rating. They don’t give to the poor because they care about the poor, they just want to be perceived as compassionate and generous. They don’t fast and uphold religious rules because they care about God; they do it so that people would perceive them as properly religious, and as such better than all those who aren’t. Interestingly, if you actually helped another person, you would know how wrong it would feel to even mention it, let alone brag about it to third parties. You did it because it felt like the right thing to do. You might have even gotten punished for it in some way. It’s a real thing that exists in the world of real things, and the reward for it is to feel reality, and participate in it. You do good things because to elevate others is to feel close to God, who is the great attractor on the coordinate axis of all greatness. Social posturing would make a real person feel diminished and soiled. On the other hand, it’s everything a fake person lives for, thinking that if they convince people, God will have no other option but to sign off on it as well, because if all the people think someone is a saint, how could God ever reject such a person, yes? The entire thing makes me want to puke, but the phenomenon is quite real, I assure you. Well, let me tell you this: God is not God because he has your vote of approval. In fact, you can all call him Satan or a Nazi for all He cares, and it would affect only you. God is God because he’s the fullness of sat-cit-ananda. God is God because He’s where all the greatness and beauty originates from, and to which all saints aspire. God doesn’t become God by giving His imprimatur to fake people who managed to deceive gullible people who lack discriminative faculties. That’s my opinion.

Dependence on computers

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I started writing about something in the comment section, but I decided it’s relevant enough to make it an article.

The CrowdStrike event looks like a very mild example of something I’ve been worrying about for years, namely a widespread systemic persistent IT outage that puts payment systems worldwide out of commission.

Basically, everybody is using digital payment for everything these days, so what happens if it all goes out for some reason? Oh, you’ll use cash. You mean, the ATM is going to work? No it isn’t. You mean, you have cash and will just use it? You mean, the cash register computer will not be afflicted, and the cashier will be willing to take your money without the ability to print out the invoice and register the transaction? Or will all the stores close until this is dealt with? In which case you will have to rely on whatever food and hygienic/medical supplies you have at your place, because you’ve been prepping? Oh wait, you’ve been prepping but since nothing happened you just consumed all the stuff and there isn’t any now? Yeah, that.

I mean, the first level of preparing for an IT outage is to have an air-gapped spare laptop stashed in some drawer, with Linux/Windows dual boot in case one of those two is the cause of failure, but the next question is, what do you connect to, if the cause of the problem is general, so the telecoms are down, banks are down, online services are down, AWS/Azure can’t process your credit card so it locks you out of your servers, GoDaddy is down so you can’t transfer your domains somewhere out of the afflicted area, or DNS is down so you can’t reach anything, or the satellites are down so Starlink doesn’t work. And let’s say it’s something really major so the consequences take so long to clear, there’s serious breakdown of services everywhere.

The first answer everybody has to this is something along the lines of “it’s unlikely that all the computer systems will go out at once”. True, it’s unlikely, but it was also previously unseen that all the enterprise win10 machines go out at once and half the world gets instantly paralyzed. Those machines aren’t independent. Microsoft enforces push updates, and the big corporations have unified IT policies which means they all enforce updates to all their machines. Also, everybody seems to run Windows, which means it’s no longer necessary for an attack vector or a blunder to target billions of computers independently, because it’s a single failure that can propagate from a single point and instantly take down enough of the network that the rest have nothing to connect to.

Also, there have recently been revelations that OpenSSL had severe vulnerabilities. The vast majority of Internet infrastructure uses OpenSSL. A systemic vulnerability that can be targeted everywhere means… you tell me.

Someone will say that people would adapt, and my answer is, what does that even mean? Every single store I’ve been in for the last decade or so uses bar-code readers to scan items, and then the computer pulls out the item data, most notably the price, from the database, so that the cashier can charge you. More recently, all those computers are required to connect to the state tax service where every bill needs to be “fiscalised” for taxation purposes. If Internet fails, the cash register can’t “fiscalise” bills and that’s going to be a problem. If the cash register is out because it’s always a Windows machine and you saw what can happen to those, and it’s connected to the Internet or the “fiscalisation” won’t work, the cashier won’t be able to tell how much the item you want to purchase costs and thus won’t be able to charge you. They don’t have prices on items anymore, like they did in the ‘80s. Everything is in the database.

Some say, run Linux, or buy a Mac. Great, but it doesn’t actually solve anything, because if every Enterprise and most smaller companies run everything on Windows, and those computers all bluescreen, what are you going to connect to, with your Linux PC? How does your computer even matter if you go to a store and you can’t buy anything, and how does it matter if you try to go online and most of everything is down, because OpenSSL has been attacked by something that gets root permissions on your computer and encrypts its filesystem?

I’ve been recently thinking that Internet isn’t so much a framework for connecting computers, but really a separate plane of existence. When I’m using my computer, I’m not really on an island in Croatia, I’m on the Internet. Imagine all the beings that exist in the physical world, but without an Internet connection, like trees, birds, cats and so on. In order to interact with them or even perceive them, you need to switch planes of existence, between physical world and the Internet. However, some aspects of the physical world, like our civilization for instance, have been abstracted into the Internet to such a degree that you can’t even use them anymore if you don’t have access to all kinds of Internet-based infrastructure, which is not currently perceived as a problem, but might become one really fast if something fundamental breaks down with the Internet.

Also, if a nefarious government or a corporation wants to lock you out of the Internet for “non-compliance”, you are really fucked, which makes it a really big sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, forcing everybody to be good and obedient slaves.

Some hindsight

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In my first book, I addressed the ecological issues caused by negative anthropogenic influences on the world, namely:

  • pollution of the soil

  • pollution of the waters

  • pollution of the atmosphere

  • damage to the ozone layer

  • the glasshouse effect

  • damage to the food chain and the ecosystem

  • electromagnetic pollution

  • acoustic pollution

  • mental and spiritual pollution

  • moral pollution

So, I think it would be interesting to go back to that list and see whether I understood the problems correctly, in the sense that I called out the actual ones, and if so, have they been remedied or exacerbated since the late 1990s.

The first thing I notice when I read the book again is that I made significant improvements in depth of understanding of the issues since then; basically, I would make a much better analysis today. However, much of it is not actually wrong.

Pollution of the soil was a real problem and actually got worse – for instance, the Americans started using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) as a method of extracting oil and gas from the ground, by pumping all kinds of toxic chemicals into the ground, contaminating ground water and creating whole lakes of toxic sludge. This is by no means an improvement. The attempt at recycling served to alleviate the guilt of the people but did little to reduce the amount of trash produced, mostly because plastic can’t actually be recycled and it’s all a fraud.

Pollution to the waters was a real problem and it also got worse. The oceans are seriously contaminated by all kinds of plastic debris that gets into the food chain, and then there are the chemicals that get dumped into the oceans, also accumulating in the food chain.

Atmospheric pollution was masked by moving industry to Asia, so that the Europeans and Americans don’t have to see it, so it got better in some places and worse in others.

Damage to the ozone layer was put under control by replacing harmful propellants and refrigerants with non-harmful ones. I guess it will take time for all the harmful stuff to filter out of the atmosphere but it no longer seems to be a serious issue. This seems to be an actual case of a climate alarm that was justified, produced a constructive response, and the issue was put under control or resolved completely.

The glasshouse effect, meaning the anthropogenic CO2 dump in the atmosphere, was an opposite case, where alarmism grew as the predictions were increasingly falsified. Basically, the predictions of the climate alarmists were falsified to such an extent, that I’m no longer sure if any of it was ever justified; there was no increase in sea levels, the increase in global temperature was so small it doesn’t justify any alarm, and the positive effects of increased atmospheric CO2 were noticed on plant life, because apparently the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was normally so little, it was a limiting factor of plant growth, so there was a noticeable greening of previous deserts. However, as the problem turned out not to be real, the hysteria of the climate alarmists reached incredible proportions and became increasingly unhinged. For instance, in Australia the “green” idiots outlawed clearing the brush because CO2 and stuff, and this provided abundant fuel for wildfires, which were then blamed on global warming. This kind of idiocy is becoming more common and is typical for crazy ideologies when they are disproved by reality, and their proponents are simply unable to accept it. For instance, when communism in the Soviet Union failed, this failure was blamed on “saboteurs” and “reactionary influences”, triggering purges.

Damage to the food chain and the ecosystem is still a problem. I don’t know whether it got worse, but it didn’t get better.

Electromagnetic pollution got worse. We are immersed in microwave noise across the spectrum and the consequences of this are not properly researched. My hunch is that some parts of this noise is harmless, because it’s not much different from the natural background, and some parts influence the cellular anatomy that normally deals with interconnectedness between spiritual and material realities, basically saturating with noise the exact parts that are necessary for normal functioning of the subtle spiritual senses.

The acoustic pollution remained the same, however “noise” became a worse, multi-spectrum issue.

The mental and spiritual pollution was a problem then, and absolutely exploded with social media and smartphones that made the connection to the Internet ubiquitous, and made it possible for everybody to be constantly brainwashed with the same, very narrow profile of stuff. It is my estimate that this is probably the worst development since I first addressed the issues, because it turned mankind into, for all intents and purposes, a singular mental entity, and this entity is an imbecile.

The moral pollution was a real problem then, and it got much worse because of all kinds of false morality and virtue signalling. The spiritual space normally occupied by a sense of right and wrong based on transcendence was supplanted by all kinds of false concerns and hysteria, and it all seems to come down to replacement of the traditional concept of human duties with the false concept of human rights.

There are also issues I didn’t address then, because they didn’t look like a problem at that time. For instance, the nuclear standoff of the 1980s seemed to be permanently resolved so I felt no need to address it in 1999, however the Americans mishandled the peace so badly, that most of the world, lead by Russia and China, seems to be permanently done with it, and as they reject American rule, conflict seems inevitable.

As a conclusion, I would say that my analysis from 1999 was mostly correct; the only thing that proved to be a non-issue is the glasshouse effect due to CO2 emission, which is hilarious considering the amount of alarmist hysteria about it. On the other hand, I never anticipated the level of mental devastation caused by the social media and the mental monoculture it created.