Table of contents

• Image of the month
• We Have Always Been Makers
• #GothamFYP
• Daniel Dennett, 1942-2024
• Recent and Current Reading
• Multi-Melting
• Looking Forward

Looking westward across the Calgary skyline toward the Rocky mountains from Major Tom in Calgary, Alberta, April 2024. Photo from the author's personal collection.

Turns out, we're always been makers.

300,000 years ago, we were making spears, and these were much more than just a branch taken from a tree.  These ancient spears show signs of careful and skilled craftsmanship, designed and created with intent for specific purpose.

So "we've always been makers" is one way to frame the takeaway from a recently published article on PNAS on Pleistocene wood tools.

And it goes much further than simply makers too. Becoming tool users may have made us human. Or allowed us to change in significant ways from our forebearers. Figure 6 in the original article (below) is the key. We can see where the development of these advanced spears took place, relative to the development in brain size of various human ancestor species.  Tool use is deeply embedded in our past, and is part of us.

So tools use and human development go hand-in-hand (pun not intended, bu appropriate), with advances in technology allowing for more efficient calorie gathering and consumption, leading to further physiological effects on our ancestors' anatomy. We would not be what we are without the technology that is part of us, that we use instinctually and habitually.

If we unwind the "lever of riches", as Joel Mokyr calls it, from our current advanced AI tools back down the chain 300,000 years ago to these sharp sticks, we find the tools that made us human at each and every step along the way.

Hmm. Sounds like we might have enough there for a series. Stay tuned...

In addition to making, of all of humanities traits, our ability to play may be one of our most amazing.  We are not alone in this, as ethologists have long observed the capacity for play in a wide variety of species, including dogs, dolphins, ravens, and killer whales.  But it's our capacity to share this play, of dipping into the collective, social imaginary, that truly makes us different.

This happened again at the beginning of April on the TikTok platform, where a number of creators started sharing tales of their life as residents of Gotham.  At first, people would tell the tale of their run-ins with Batman, or Robin, or The Joker, from the point of view of an average citizen of Gotham.

And then it took off.  The denizens of Metropolis started to chime in, arguing over which group of citizens had it worse: those dealing with muggers and psychopaths, or those rebuilding after a surprising number of alien invasions.

People from all walks of life chimed in with various theories of the potential secret identities of public figures, or their dalliances with various spandex crimefighters, and speculation on just how many different Robin's there might have been.

And all of this without breaking the unwritten rules of the bit: everything was from the POV of citizens, as if they lived in Gotham, and no one was outting any of the established "secret" lore of the DC Universe.

It was awesome.  The public's ability to participate in a collective social imaginary, born of years of fanfic and RPGs, and a desire to play, to just post stuff they like online and have fun.

Of course, it only occupied the collective imagination for a little while.  Soon everyone was focussed on Donghua Jinlong industrial grade glycine for some reason...

(ellipses too)

Finding aspirational figures is tough, in academia as in all walks of life, and Daniel Dennett was one of mine.  I first encountered his writings in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it was really inspirational to me.  I picked up a copy of Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) for myself , and poured through it relentlessly. It was erudite but approachable, and filled with a vast amount of interrelated topics, fuelling my interest in "connectionism" that had been started by James Burke back with his reruns were shown on A&E in the 90s.

DDI was one of the driving forces that inspired my in the pursuit of further knowledge, going into grad school in the later part of my career.  I had a chance to meet him once, around 2007 when he spoke on campus, and I got him to sign my well-worn and dog-eared copy of his book. Through all his writings, through his exploration of consciousness and philosophy and evolution, and all the things he brought into it, I found he had a measured amount of skepticism and a healthy amount of curiosity, and it was the way that he brought together information from multiple different fields in the search of new knowledge or explanations for things we saw in front of us that really inspired me.

Daniel Dennett, thanks for everything you did for bringing new knowledge into the world. Take care.

The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age (Kurz, 2023)

As noted last issue, I was reading through this at the time, and to be honest I'm still chasing down some of the details, but I've gone through the overall thrust of the book so it felt right to cover it here. Mordecai Kurz is a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford, and in this tome he goes to great lengths to cover the historical and economic forces that have results in "the second gilded age" which forms part of the book's title.

He uncovers how the laissez-faire policies in the US at the time of the invention of a new GPT allowed for the consolidation of market power, and in turn led to the rising inequality that typified the gilded age.  The first gilded age occurred around the invention of electricity and combustion engine, and the second one is taking place as an effect of the rise of information technologies.  We talked a bit about these GPTs (General Purpose Technologies) recently in Episode E0031, if you're interested in that part of the argument. The book contains much more.

I appreciate how the book caters to both a technical and a non-technical audience, with guidelines about which chapters and subtopics are suitable for the general audience, and which burrow down into the econometrics and calculations behind the logic.  I think this will help in its accessibility, and I hope it becomes more widely read, because the meat of the book is in the recommendations that are put forth on how to deal with the Second Gilded Age.

Found in chapters 8, 9 and 10, the policy portion of this book is aimed at that non-technical audience, and deals with how we can address the market power and enclosure that happens with the rise of a new GPT, while still ensuring innovation occurs. Things as (seemingly) radical as a 70% top tax rate, increased unionization, and national policy all come into play.

As said above, I'm still going through these recommendations, and will post a synopsis on the blog once I'm done.  Until then, if a fairly deep book on economics sounds like your bag, track done a copy at your bookstore or library of choice.

The closing article from a special issue of Theory, Culture, and Society from a few years ago, this was a long read, but an important one to situate the changes to the public sphere brought about by the ascension of social media into the firmament.

A number of the articles are open access, so I'll wait to finish those before I do a full review, but Habermas makes some pretty salient points, and is able to fit his work on the Public Sphere into the current cultural context.

(For more on the Public Sphere, check out episode E0009 of the podcast!)

In the Warhammer 40000 game, there is a weapon called the "multi-melta" a ludicrous gun made better by strapping more of them together.  It's awesome.  I always think of it when I hear the term multimedia, so here we go.

This has been a fantastic addition to the Fallout franchise, turning into a proper transmedia work of art where elements from different adaptations and translations all feed into the larger whole.  Looking for an upcoming podcast episode (or two!) on this on the Implausipod.

Viewed a showing as part of CUFF 2024, this biopic of Village Voice and New York Observer staff photographer James Hamilton ends up covering not just the craft of photojournalism, but how it has changed over time, viewed through a million pictures.

Fascinating, and worth a look once it gets a major release.

And well, the Fallout series was good enough to warrant a play through the most recent title in the Fallout universe too.  I had tried the VR version of this, but it wasn't designed for VR natively, and so playing through it felt a little clunky.  Switched to normal mode for this playthrough, and it's been fun so far.

Next month, in May we'll be reviewing some public events involving dinosaurs and superheroes, and be expanding the gallery as the snow melts and road-trip season begins.

Both podcasts should be continuing, and recent episodes of both the Implausipod and AppendixW should be out shortly after you see this.

Until then, take care and have fun.

Dr Implausible