It’s a comforting New Year ritual for me to read along with Bruce Sterling’s* annual State of the World discussion at the WELL.

This year is slightly more predictable than most because the obvious topics are so hard to avoid:

I had it figured that a failed coup would surely be followed by some kind of purge, but I didn’t get it that it would come from a united front of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Youtube, Reddit, Twitch, Discord and Shopify….
Somebody – who?– got all these tech players on the same page and launched a simultaneous attack without a single rumor leaking beforehand.

But there is at least some of his usual attention to the rest of the world:

Prime Minister Modi, head honcho of India, has become the most attentive pupil of Xi Jinping of China. Modi is much impressed by Xi’s autocratic success, so Modi has become an adept China mimic: he numbers all the citizenry in the Aadhaar databank, he turns Kashmir into Xinjiang with all kinds of surveillance heavy-manners and Internet controls, he turns his BJP Party into Chinese-style party cadres, he cultivates his own Chinese-style cult-of-personality – step by step, Modi is constructing a Modi-centric Indian government that is “Chinese technocracy with Indian characteristics.”

(*) and other people, but Sterling is the main reason I keep coming back.

The problem with historians is that they know too much.

In particular, they know how things turned out. When you have the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to avoid simply assembling a narrative leading up to that result.

So I wish somebody would try doing blinded historical research.

Here’s how it would work. You want a historian to analyze the events and the forces at play in some historical context without knowing what comes next.

So you give them access to archives, newspapers, records – but only up to a certain date. They write their analysis of what is going on, and describe what they expect to happen next. Then you reveal what did happen, and compare it to the predictions.

The result? The historian can apply whatever methodology they like – and see how good it is at making predictions. Then you could apply the same methods in situations where you don’t know what will happen (e.g. the present), and have a ballpark idea of how much trust to put in it.

It’s a comforting New Year ritual for me to read along with Bruce Sterling’s* annual State of the World discussion at the WELL.

This year is slightly more predictable than most because the obvious topics are so hard to avoid:

I had it figured that a failed coup would surely be followed by some kind of purge, but I didn’t get it that it would come from a united front of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Youtube, Reddit, Twitch, Discord and Shopify….
Somebody – who?– got all these tech players on the same page and launched a simultaneous attack without a single rumor leaking beforehand.

But there is at least some of his usual attention to the rest of the world:

Prime Minister Modi, head honcho of India, has become the most attentive pupil of Xi Jinping of China. Modi is much impressed by Xi’s autocratic success, so Modi has become an adept China mimic: he numbers all the citizenry in the Aadhaar databank, he turns Kashmir into Xinjiang with all kinds of surveillance heavy-manners and Internet controls, he turns his BJP Party into Chinese-style party cadres, he cultivates his own Chinese-style cult-of-personality – step by step, Modi is constructing a Modi-centric Indian government that is “Chinese technocracy with Indian characteristics.”

(*) and other people, but Sterling is the main reason I keep coming back.

The problem with historians is that they know too much.

In particular, they know how things turned out. When you have the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to avoid simply assembling a narrative leading up to that result.

So I wish somebody would try doing blinded historical research.

Here’s how it would work. You want a historian to analyze the events and the forces at play in some historical context without knowing what comes next.

So you give them access to archives, newspapers, records – but only up to a certain date. They write their analysis of what is going on, and describe what they expect to happen next. Then you reveal what did happen, and compare it to the predictions.

The result? The historian can apply whatever methodology they like – and see how good it is at making predictions. Then you could apply the same methods in situations where you don’t know what will happen (e.g. the present), and have a ballpark idea of how much trust to put in it.

One of my lockdown activities has been remotely watching short movies with a friend. Here are a few of them, from best to worst.

Emilie Muller. A young woman attends an audition, where the director requires her to talk him through the contents of her handbag. As their conversation veers into more personal territory, we become very aware of the power dynamics and the patterns of self-dramatization. Along the way, though, there is some lovely slice-of-life discussion sparked by the objects.

House Party. A Romanian woman comes home, to find her teenage son has thrown a house party in her absence. This short is much subtler than you might expect from the set-up. Its heart is the relationship between the women living in the same apartment block. I suspect much of the nuance has been lost in translation, but still worth watching.

The Jigsaw. A dusty, little-frequented shop. You try to buy a jigsaw. The shopkeeper tries to discourage you with mysterious warnings, before finally relenting and selling you the puzzle.
Yes, you are in a horror film. Yes, every trope is going to be played absolutely straight. No, this one doesn’t have much to recommend it

One of my lockdown activities has been remotely watching short movies with a friend. Here are a few of them, from best to worst.

Emilie Muller. A young woman attends an audition, where the director requires her to talk him through the contents of her handbag. As their conversation veers into more personal territory, we become very aware of the power dynamics and the patterns of self-dramatization. Along the way, though, there is some lovely slice-of-life discussion sparked by the objects.

House Party. A Romanian woman comes home, to find her teenage son has thrown a house party in her absence. This short is much subtler than you might expect from the set-up. Its heart is the relationship between the women living in the same apartment block. I suspect much of the nuance has been lost in translation, but still worth watching.

The Jigsaw. A dusty, little-frequented shop. You try to buy a jigsaw. The shopkeeper tries to discourage you with mysterious warnings, before finally relenting and selling you the puzzle.
Yes, you are in a horror film. Yes, every trope is going to be played absolutely straight. No, this one doesn’t have much to recommend it

Last night Harry Ramsay hosted a discussion of flow), which left me more of a flow-sceptic than I was at the start.

Here’s what I realized. Flow is part of a spectrum of trance-like focus states. We pick it out because it fits with characteristics which we like: productivity, creativity, accomplishment. But those are characteristics of external society, not of the mental state itself.

I brought up video gaming in the discussion, calling the gamer’s trance the ‘evil twin’ of flow. Look at the properties of flow, and see how well gaming matches them:

• The activity is intrinsically rewarding
• Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable
• Complete focus on the activity itself
• Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome
• Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness
• Immediate feedback
• Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented
• Lack of awareness of physical needs
• Strong concentration and focused attention
• Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing

With the arguable exception of ‘intrinsically rewarding’, it is a 100% match.

Harry’s descriptions of his teenage flow states practicing the guitar, in particular, feel indistinguishable from gaming. Both involve mastering a pattern of tiny physical movements, through extreme repetition.

The difference comes afterwards: your self-image is likely better emerging from a day-long music session than from a Warcraft binge. Again, though, that’s a social phenomenon: it’s not hard to imagine a culture which venerates gamers and despises musicians. Would that change which activity gets the label of flow?

Further loosen the requirements of flow, and we end up with more altered states of dubious value. Slot-machine addicts use the term ‘th e zone’ to describe their state of being subsumed within the logic of the machine. And of course we are all familiar with the experience of compulsively scrolling social media.

By now we’ve kicked away much of what makes flow flow. Slot machines are neither challenging nor rewarding. Facebook slips into our lives partly because it (at first) avoids demanding complete attention. Yet something remains common in all these worlds, and more.

Thinking about my own life, I find this comforting. Flow ceases to be an isolated, mystical achievement. It is merely the most prominent of an archipelago of altered states.

Every activity brings its own state of consciousness. Swimming, drawing, dancing, DIY: none of these are (for me) flow states. But each shares something with flow – focus, mastery, serenity, control, the absence of time or the dissolution of the self.

So now I no longer so keen to nudge myself repeatedly into flow. I would prefer to explore the entire realm of activity-induced altered states.

Last night Harry Ramsay hosted a discussion of flow), which left me more of a flow-sceptic than I was at the start.

Here’s what I realized. Flow is part of a spectrum of trance-like focus states. We pick it out because it fits with characteristics which we like: productivity, creativity, accomplishment. But those are characteristics of external society, not of the mental state itself.

I brought up video gaming in the discussion, calling the gamer’s trance the ‘evil twin’ of flow. Look at the properties of flow, and see how well gaming matches them:

• The activity is intrinsically rewarding
• Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable
• Complete focus on the activity itself
• Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome
• Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness
• Immediate feedback
• Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented
• Lack of awareness of physical needs
• Strong concentration and focused attention
• Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing

With the arguable exception of ‘intrinsically rewarding’, it is a 100% match.

Harry’s descriptions of his teenage flow states practicing the guitar, in particular, feel indistinguishable from gaming. Both involve mastering a pattern of tiny physical movements, through extreme repetition.

The difference comes afterwards: your self-image is likely better emerging from a day-long music session than from a Warcraft binge. Again, though, that’s a social phenomenon: it’s not hard to imagine a culture which venerates gamers and despises musicians. Would that change which activity gets the label of flow?

Further loosen the requirements of flow, and we end up with more altered states of dubious value. Slot-machine addicts use the term ‘th e zone’ to describe their state of being subsumed within the logic of the machine. And of course we are all familiar with the experience of compulsively scrolling social media.

By now we’ve kicked away much of what makes flow flow. Slot machines are neither challenging nor rewarding. Facebook slips into our lives partly because it (at first) avoids demanding complete attention. Yet something remains common in all these worlds, and more.

Thinking about my own life, I find this comforting. Flow ceases to be an isolated, mystical achievement. It is merely the most prominent of an archipelago of altered states.

Every activity brings its own state of consciousness. Swimming, drawing, dancing, DIY: none of these are (for me) flow states. But each shares something with flow – focus, mastery, serenity, control, the absence of time or the dissolution of the self.

So now I no longer so keen to nudge myself repeatedly into flow. I would prefer to explore the entire realm of activity-induced altered states.

The hallmark behavioral difference between domesticated animals and their wild contemporaries is a lower threshold of reaction to external stimuli and an overall reduced wariness of other species—including Homo sapiens. The likelihood that such traits are in part a “domus effect” rather than entirely due to conscious human selection is, once again, suggested by the fact that uninvited commensals such as statuary pigeons, rats, mice, and sparrows exhibit much the same reduced wariness and reactivity. [James C Scott, Against the Grain]

Domesticated cows are hard to startle. But so are city pigeons. So the cows might have developed their calmness not as a result of deliberate selective breeding, but through the evolutionary effects of sharing habitat with humans.

Change the habitat, change the behaviour. You don’t necessarily need to breed or train waway fear and aggression – just create a situation where they are not useful.

Scott is primarily talking in evolutionary timescales, but the same applies within a lifetime. And it applies to humans as well as to animals.

We are constantly being trained by our habitat. The commuter has been conditioned to stand inches away from his fellow-travellers, just like the Wild West gunslinger who never sits with his back to the door has been conditioned. No need to explicitly train attitudes to personal space, just make the Tube the easiest route to work.

There’s an obvious self-directed extension of this. When you want to change your own behaviour, perhaps don’t attempt to train yourself directly. Instead set up an environment which encourages the desired behaviour, and let the environment do the training.

The hallmark behavioral difference between domesticated animals and their wild contemporaries is a lower threshold of reaction to external stimuli and an overall reduced wariness of other species—including Homo sapiens. The likelihood that such traits are in part a “domus effect” rather than entirely due to conscious human selection is, once again, suggested by the fact that uninvited commensals such as statuary pigeons, rats, mice, and sparrows exhibit much the same reduced wariness and reactivity. [James C Scott, Against the Grain]

Domesticated cows are hard to startle. But so are city pigeons. So the cows might have developed their calmness not as a result of deliberate selective breeding, but through the evolutionary effects of sharing habitat with humans.

Change the habitat, change the behaviour. You don’t necessarily need to breed or train waway fear and aggression – just create a situation where they are not useful.

Scott is primarily talking in evolutionary timescales, but the same applies within a lifetime. And it applies to humans as well as to animals.

We are constantly being trained by our habitat. The commuter has been conditioned to stand inches away from his fellow-travellers, just like the Wild West gunslinger who never sits with his back to the door has been conditioned. No need to explicitly train attitudes to personal space, just make the Tube the easiest route to work.

There’s an obvious self-directed extension of this. When you want to change your own behaviour, perhaps don’t attempt to train yourself directly. Instead set up an environment which encourages the desired behaviour, and let the environment do the training.