NTROPIC MUSINGS

One of my more obscure hobbies is messing around with mathematics via Python programming, and I’ve recently completed a strange project connected to the Champernowne Constant Cn. It started with simply writing a Python prog to generate arbitrary chunks of C₃₆ – that constant in base-36 number system, which enables a simple encoding of English text since all the alphabet letters become valid digits. Having written this I calibrated its execution time in Pydroid 3 on my Intel 12th-gen Core i3 CPU, and learned that my own name ‘dick_pountain’ would take around 20,000 years to arrive if all printed to the screen, while Hamlet’s Soliloquy would take 2 million years. (Obviously I didn’t find these ridiculous times by actual execution, but rather calculated their positions in C₁₀ using the formula P(n)=1+k=1∑d−1​9k⋅10k−1+d(n−10d−1) and then extrapolated from shorter test samples.) 

This set me to thinking that the position of a text fragment in C₃₆, or C₁₀ for that matter, says something about the uniqueness of that fragment. Now another, earlier, project of mine was a program to ‘cheat’ at Wordle (to which I’m addicted) by ranking the uniqueness of 5-letter words using the frequency distribution of alphabet letters in English. Having those frequency tables from that project at hand. I decided to combine the two projects: for any text T, find its position in C₁₀ (using a simpler ASCII encoding for convenience), then calculate the sum of the uniquenesses of all the separate words it contains and take the ratio of those two numbers. Since they can get very large indeed a lot of ‘log10ing’ is required even in Python with its huge floats. The ratio, which I’ve dubbed the text’s ‘ntropy’, might or might not mean something, but I’m damned if I can figure out what… 

GENGHIS TRUMP?

It can’t have escaped some of my readers that customary Left-wing analyses have become a rather poor fit with our current predicament, namely the ongoing disruption caused by Donald Trump’s 2nd term as US President. We’re accustomed, even those of us who aren’t dogmatic Marxists, to think about politics as having something to do with class. There’s the class of people who have to work for a living, and the class of people who own factories, studios, etc etc who employ them. In the middle there are small businesses, freelancers, artists etc etc. The assumption has been that the class who own capital knows how to stick together and protect their interests better than everyone else, hence the inequality and other ills that beset us.

Trump poses a challenge to that assumption. He captured the US Republican Party by appearing to be one of them, a representative of the ruling capitalist class who would advance their interests by deregulation and tax cuts. But what if that’s not who he is? It’s starting to look as though he may be a throwback to something pre-capitalist, a neo-feudal dynast after the model of Mogul Emperors and Chinese Warlords, whose only loyalty is to his own power and wealth and that of his immediate family (not even his disposable entourage). 

What prompts this thought is that his reckless tariff war is beginning to look very dangerous to the interests of the US industrial capitalist class, and some Republicans are already starting to realise this. Perhaps those promised tax cuts might get reduced by a heap of pseudo-populist payouts to that dispossessed, disgruntled proletarian MAGA base that elected him – attempting to forge stronger links between a new peasantry and their beneficent overlord. And should the demolition of the Silicon Valley oligarchs prove another side-effect, so much the better as he sees them as competitors, not friends.

If there’s any truth at all in this speculation, then expect some very exciting fireworks in the near future as the oligos spend all the money in the world trying to dislodge the man who ostensibly controls the armed forces and intelligence services…. 

WIDENING GYRE

The world appears too crazy at the moment to step back far enough (or for long enough) and say anything joined-up -- so I'll fudge it by stringing together a bunch of thoughts I've posted recently on social media as they occurred to me. Re-arrange them to make a well-known phrase or political outlook....

ON READING RICHARD COCKETT'S 'VIENNA'

History shows repeatedly that as capitalism reaches a terminal crisis the choice  is between Fascism and Social Democracy, but that the far Left and far Right always collaborate to prevent Social Democracy. Weimar, Red Vienna, today's China, the USA?

GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGE

For 80+ years the right-wing of the US Republican Party has wanted to roll-back Roosevelt's New Deal. For the whole of the 21st century they've been promoting 'culture wars' to roll back the social changes wrought by the '60s counterculture. Since Trump's first presidency they've promised to weed out the 'deep state' of federal security agencies. Now they look to be within sight of winning the big coconut, by reversing the result of the Civil War and restoring rule by the states...

DOUBLE ACT

When some future historian, (animal or digital, of whatever species, from whatever nation or planet impossible to guess), sets out to write 'The Fall Of The US Empire', 2025 will be labelled the era of the 'Dual Monarchy'

HISTORY UPDATE

OK, please have your history book ready for the following update. Many thought that the Cold War ended in a Western victory in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. This must now be revised to read, the Cold War ended in Russian victory in February 2025 with the activation of the assets they've installed in the US White House.

HELL OF A YEAR

2024 has been a Hell Of A Year, almost literally, so that will have to be my excuse for neglecting this blog for a while. However I will post these two significant pieces I did for different platforms as a stop-gap. 

A review of Susan Neiman for Political Quarterly:
https://substack.com/@politicalquarterly/note/c-7933333

And a podcast of a trip to Prague for The Scotch Malt Whisky Society:
https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague

Whisky Talk podcast:
https://whiskytalk.fireside.fm/66

HEBE-JEEBIES

I recently finished watching all 18 episodes of Paul Cooper’s excellent podcast series ‘Fall Of Civilisations’ (available free on several platforms including YouTube). As well as provoking a new-found admiration for the Nabataean civilisation and revulsion against the Romans, it’s made me think about the way our own civilisation is going to collapse, which is not an easy think: there too many candidates for the coup de grace - climate change, war (nuke or plain), crypto-economic ruin, pandemic, asteroid strike. Perm any two or three, each-way cross-and-double…

The required thought wasn’t made any easier by writing my latest book review, David Lay Williams ‘The Greatest Of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato To Marx’. It’s a philosophical analysis of pleonexia – that insatiable greed which has driven despots throughout Cooper’s millenia of repeated collapse – and which thanks to democracy now spreads well beyond the realm of the plutocracy.

Then today a revelation arrived from a most unexpected direction, Sainsbury’s supermarket, who sent me this Christmas gift of extra credit points. A quick Google informs me that the toe-curlingly embarrassing jargon which peppers this missive derives from the works of Roald Dahl, a man whom the BBC once described as “an unpleasant man who wrote macabre books – and yet children around the world adore them”. I had the privilege of learning to read in the pre-Dahl era, and bear no malice toward the man but rather toward whoever, in some advertising agency in some glittering tower office, decided that employing this imbecilic jargon while the Ukraine, and Gaza, and Lebanon, and Syria and [insert latest] are going up in flames and concrete dust, was going to improve my morale this Christmas.



With Elon Musk spending 15 whole minutes of his income ($250,000,000) to help elect Donald Trump, pleonexia does remain one of our greatest problems, but now that we’re all so focused on mental health perhaps it’s worth re-evaluating hebephrenia too. Wikipedia will tell you this is an obsolete term for a subtype of schizophrenia, no longer recognized as a separate condition following the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) in 2013. (Even forms of madness are no longer safe from being reclassified). Originally proposed by the German psychiatrist Ewald Hecker in the 1870s as an "insanity of youth", he named it after the Greek term for "adolescence" – ἥβη (hḗbē) – and thought it was more prevalent between the ages of 15 and 25. Prominent characteristics were disorganized behavior and speech, including loosened associations and schizophasia ("word salad"), flat or inappropriate affect, absence of frank delusions and hallucinations but behavioral disorganization may that might impair a sufferer's ability to carry out daily activities such as showering or eating. Emotional responses could seem strange or inappropriate, including inappropriate facial expressions or laughter – or by contrast a complete lack of emotion, including anhedonia (lack of pleasure) and avolition (lack of motivation).

Although the DSM says it’s no longer a brand of madness you can aspire to, that may be because it’s become fully integrated into our Western way of life and popular culture. Some future Paul Cooper (if there is one, they may be a mollusc or rodent rather than a primate) will perhaps remember us as the Hebephrenic Culture of the 20-21st centuries who sank down in flames giggling to Monty Python’s ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’.

UNCIVIL WAR

I've just seen Alex Garland's latest movie 'Civil War', which has topped the viewing rankings in the USA despite mostly bad reviews, which complain that it skips over the politics that lead up to his imagined future war between the East and West coasts. I came out of it shattered by the depiction of urban warfare using modern weapon systems, which has a realism not seen since 'The Hurt Locker' (incidentally the film nods toward another Kathryn Bigelow movie, 'Zero Dark Thirty', but putting a future US President in place of Osama bin Laden!) 

Garland's decision to leave the politics of this war obscure is both commercially and politically shrewd, and highly effective. It means that American viewers of Right, Centre or Left conviction, or none at all, can watch it as an antiwar film whose horrifying events could as well be happening in the Ukraine or Gaza. It also subverts our own class stereotypes outside of the USA -- are those violent characters who look like Jan 6th Trump supporters on the East or the West side? Once the soldiers take charge, politics evaporate.

Garland has announced that he's retiring from directing after this movie, which is a pity since for me he's filled a movie space that Spielberg vacated due to increasing sentimentality. Garland's 'Ex Machina' is the most caustic depiction of AI and Silicon Valley megalomania I've seen, and was made several years before anyone had even heard of GPT. His 'Annihilation' is just plain nuts, but it's the most unsettling 'horror' film I've seen, and I don't even like horror films. 

AN IMPOSSIBLE MESS?

I don’t have any special credentials to comment on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The current atmosphere is febrile with hideous wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the looming possibility of a re-elected Trump and an escalating confrontation between China and the US/UK axis (if one can still call it that). Making sense of the various powers, their possible alliances and the global consequences is all but impossible. What almost forces me to comment on this impossible mess right now is an event that many may regard as peripheral, almost trivial, and that is the announcement by the US government that it’s to launch an antitrust case against Apple Corp for monopolising the smartphone business. 

I’m not an Apple fan and use products of its rival Google, like the Android operating system and phone, in my everyday affairs. I’m also a fan of antitrust legislation, being an admirer of Thorstein Veblen (as mentioned in this blog several times) and the role his theories played in taming the monopolist corporations during the USA’s ‘Gilded Age’ in the late 1890s, and starting its brief Progressive Era. However that doesn’t help to quell a certain foreboding about this case, and to explain why I need to sketch my own perception of current geopolitical realities. 

I see three principal actors in the USA, China and India, three secondary ones in Russia, The EU and the IT moguls of Silicon Valley, and then the rest of the world. If you have a problem accepting Silicon Valley as one of the world powers, then this video from Nvidia might perhaps persuade you. The next few years will be dominated by the extent to which China actually allies itself with Putin’s Russia (whose economy it supports by purchasing oil and gas) to try to overturn the post-WWII world order. Another critical factor will be whether Trump gains re-election, cripples NATO and permits Putin to threaten the EU. 

But the third factor, and one perhaps better understood by techies than political scientists, is the extent to which the US has a monopoly over the most leading-edge silicon chip technology, of which it’s currently attempting to deprive China, but whose material basis lies not on the US continent but the tiny island of Taiwan. Biden has stated his intention to repatriate chip fabrication capability from Taiwan to the continental USA, but the time, expense and effort involved in rebuilding all these ‘fabs’ (chip fabrication factories) is something few really appreciate. And China has of course long ago stated its own intention to eventually grab Taiwan.

So finally I arrive at the punch line. The founders of the Silicon Valley tech revolution were nearly all inclined (even if only peripherally) to the 1960s counterculture, and though their corporations have since grown into unprecedented wealth – greater than that of many small countries, and able to exert pressure even on the US government – most have remained pretty much on what Americans describe as the ‘liberal’ wing of politics, leaning toward the Democratic Party (and yes I am aware of the big exceptions like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer). The nightmare scenario would be for this antitrust case to turn Apple toward a renewed Trump presidency, catalysing a similar shift throughout the whole sector, merging their interests with an authoritarian state and creating the basis for the sort of techno-feudal plutocracy that’s been prophesied (and criticised) by many leftwing commentators like Yanis Varoufakis and Evgeny Morozov.