OPERATIONS: ALL THE THINGS STATUS: inbox 175, rss 1000, everything is out of control READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
By Christmas 1975, the CIA’s optimism about the broad political situation in the Middle East was accompanied by a relatively sanguine view of the threat from terrorism too. The December edition of its monthly summary of international threats ended with an unusual warning. On the night of the 24th of the month, the agency said, a ‘new organisation of uncertain makeup using the name The Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge’ was planning ‘to sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole’. Security precautions were being co-ordinated worldwide and the ‘prime minister [of the North Pole] and chief courier S. Claus had been notified’.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Politics in Britain has returned to high psychodrama, the kind you normally find in failing states.
Just noticed I haven’t set the date window on this watch! 8C with a feels-like of 4C, which explains the pain in my hands and wrists this morning, and the sky to the east has turned black.
Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on April 1, mechatronics engineer Rodrigo Trevisan Okamoto received confirmation he had been waiting for since the Artemis 2 mission was announced in 2023. The email from NASA stated that the crew of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century would carry a device developed by Okamoto and his team at Condor Instruments, a São Paulo-based startup.
“The NASA announcement was sudden and caught us by surprise. And it was only after the mission concluded that we learned the astronauts had been using the equipment in tests for the past two years,” Okamoto told Agência FAPESP.
The device, called an actigraph, is shaped like a wristwatch and incorporates accelerometers, as well as light and temperature sensors, to precisely map the user’s sleep and wake patterns over the course of days or weeks.
In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, colleagues at Cornell University, published “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature as part of the emerging field of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.3 Recognizing the spin-flip resonance frequency of hydrogen and noting the ubiquity of the element throughout the cosmos, they deduced that other technologically advanced civilizations would similarly attempt to transmit messages on what they termed “the hydrogen line.” In effect, the scientists had identified a pre-civilizational cosmic commons: the hydrogen envelope enshrouding the Big Bang’s host of celestial bodies, cosmic detritus, and all potentially existing lifeforms beyond planet Earth—an open field for interstellar communication held in common before any civilization arrived to claim it.
The 1420 MHz band is now protected by international convention, reserved strictly for the reception of potential transmissions and restricted from commercial or terrestrial use. The hydrogen line is thus shuttered to the appropriations of what Bataille terms “the restricted economy.”4 In our secular scientific world, the hydrogen line serves as the part of the frequency spectrum humanity holds open for contact with inhuman realms…
You notice the anxious darting of his eyes, then the makeup: thick, chalky concealer layered over skin that looks irritated, acne ridden and painful underneath it. His content team trails him carrying bright portable lights, but he doesn’t speak to them like a boss or even a collaborator. He speaks to them like an insecure thirteen-year-old midway through a panic attack: rapid little bursts about how the angle is wrong, how his skin looks bad, how he’s not even talking to the right people.
Within thirty minutes he’s completely withdrawn, sitting alone at the edge of a banquet, scrolling on his phone. Every few seconds his face twitches slightly, tiny repetitive tics perhaps a side effect of the chemical cocktail he’s on.
I had no desire to speak to him. I watched several girls try, only for Clavicular to speak about them while they were still standing there, openly complaining to his entourage that the interactions weren’t interesting enough to clip into content.
Before I leave I glance over Clavicular’s shoulder to see what he’s scrolling on.
No surprise: himself.
He flips between platforms checking views with total concentration, pausing at different uploads like a trader monitoring stock performance.
STATUS: spring is apparently on pause, and this week has turned into a cluster – lost yesterday to plumbing issues that cost me five hundred quid, the day after I said, we’ve got a little money, let’s go out to that very expensive restaurant on Friday… READING:THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
At dawn, he walked a short distance to a stream to wash. He had just knelt to splash water on his face when a tremendous blast of hot air flattened him among the rocks. When he recovered his senses, staring upwards, he saw the afterburners of two Israeli F-4 Phantom jets disappearing into the sky and, very close to him, a small green lizard that he would remember for the rest of his life. Apart from cuts and bruises, a bloodied forehead and singed hair, Ekberg was unhurt. As he staggered back, unable to hear anything other than the ringing in his ears, he saw men running and gesticulating, a severed leg on the ground, what looked like entrails caught on tree branches. Fires were burning among the trees and the air smelt of roast meat, cordite and faeces.
Big fog day. I remember a morning, not long after I started school – probably five years old, maybe six – blanketed in thick fog. Got to school, and my classroom was a couple of floors up. And everyone was at the windows. Because the top of the fogbank was lower than the height we were at, so we could look down on the roof of the fog, and it was like walking around above the clouds. I remember that sense of surreal altitude, and that we were seeing something rare. We just walked upstairs to look down at the tops of clouds.
A recent NATO report defined cognitive warfare as the “manipulation of the enemy’s cognition,” involving “the use of all knowledge, strategies, and available tools to impact human behavior…. with the end goal of manipulating and altering decision-making.” Under this definition, the systems associated with technological innovation offer ripe pickings for cognitive-style warfare. Now that humans have fashioned this highly vulnerable domain, defined by the ever-deepening and increasingly structured union of humans and machines, we can no longer ignore the opportunities and threats we have built into it.
Cognitive warfare. “The Innovation System as a Disruptive Battlespace,” sure, great title. But. COGNITIVE WARFARE.
READING:THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
I suspect that there are various spirits within me. My sister and my father are two among many. They haunt me on different floors and almost never at the same moment.
Supposedly the “jazz shoe” is making a comeback, “Repetto’s Zizi is made using the same 1960s cousu-retourné stitch-and-return technique; demand for the style has grown by 10 per cent over the past three years, buoyed by the collective shift towards softer, lower-profile footwear. (According to Edited’s Katharine Carter, shoes on the market described as “chunky” and “platform” are down 33 per cent year-on-year.)”
OPERATIONS: still zero energy, so today is for scriptment – that version of scripting where you just slap down dialogue and vague directions and then go back when you feel human to convert it up into full script. STATUS: two steps from the boneyard READING:A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Still gripped by plague. The weather outside is dismal and has been for days – the garden has become an intractable bog and I have new plants sitting in buckets of water, waiting for the possibility of me having two days without rain and the ability to move without coughing or otherwise dripping.
OPERATIONS: work is for people not drowning in their own fluids STATUS: ded. Less than 7hrs sleep. Inbox 150. Connecting the Retro Nano to the phone and doing podcasts all day. READING:SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I’ve been reading newsletters. Lots of different kinds. I did that awful thing last night where I disappeared into my phone for four hours, just reading and studying and appraising. I’ve been having to rejig my own newsletter a bit this month, due to a dose of Best Laid Plans being laughed at by the universe. Because the universe is mostly dark matter.
I have a feeling I’ve seen a few people comment that there is more writing out in the world than at any time in human history. And, of course, print literature now has to jostle for money with paid Substacks and the like, just as broadcast TV now has to wrestle with streamers for every eyeball. Lots of launches, lots of decaying orbits. Space is weird right now and I’m wondering what it looks like and what’s next.
TODAY:
Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 4% chance of hitting the moon. Astronomers who never saw SPACE 1999 or read SEVENEVES are very excited about this because they could look at real-time collision effects, moonquakes, maybe recover chunks of rock and absolutely not witness the moon knocked out of its orbit.
“Did you know Charles Babbage hosted soirées most Saturday nights during the London “season” from the early 1830s until the early 1850s? That’s where Ada Lovelace first saw the difference engine when she was just 17. The guest list included people you’ve definitely heard of: Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and Felix Mendelsohn for instance, and people who were as famous at the time, like Caroline Norton, the author and political lobbyist who secured divorced women the right to custody of their own children, and later copyright of their own writing. Or Mary Somerset, the famed mathematician. Harriet Martineau, arguably Britain’s first sociologist, and Monsieur Sismondi, the Swiss economist who coined the term proletariat. Actors, sculptors, politicians, aristocrats and inventors all came to these events.” No, I did not!
I have a feeling I briefly met Aleks Krotoski in Brighton once, when having coffee with Ben Hammersley? Anyway, this book seems to tie into some work I’m doing right now (which I am dreadfully late on).
What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations.
THE IMMORTALISTS: THE DEATH OF DEATH AND THE RACE FOR ETERNAL LIFE, Aleks Krotoski (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: yesterday was a clusterfuck so today I am all in until midnight STATUS: I am well aware that I am behind on a hundred emails READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Everything seems to be happening a lot, doesn’t it? I’ve barely even left the house this week because of work and weather, and yet there doesn’t seem to be enough time to either get the work done or keep up with anything else. Instagram was my last footprint in social media and I’ve hardly even looked at it lately, let alone used it. I’m supposed to be disconnecting and reading books and watching films and writing in my notebook at night and I find myself buried in news apps and newsletters and search engines (often while watching Bloomberg with one eye) until 1130pm while also writing material directly on to my phone because it’s in my hand which is the WORST habit. (IA Writer is great for that. DON’T DO IT.)
“A video of a slender bamboo stalk that somehow grew through a metal lamp post near the World Trade Plaza in Xinchang County, China’s Zhejiang Province, has gone viral on social media. Dubbed the “Indomitable Bamboo”, the resilient plant took root just a few centimeters from the lamp post and made its way inside it through a small opening near the base.”
OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter, STATUS: the girl cat is fine – apparently she’s just lost weight and assumed her ultimate form. Less overnight email than at any time in probably the last ten years. READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Hello from out here in the Thames Delta. I haven’t written here in a few days, so I’m attempting to make a fresh start with a single daily note for a while.
OPERATIONS: production has been, frankly, fucked this week. I have a script to land and I still need to rebuild the template for the newsletter. Two weeks into the new year and I’m at least four weeks behind. STATUS: Haven’t been feeling my best and it’s been one of those weeks here where nobody seems to want to allow me the sole uninterrupted use of my own (very tired) brain. Best night’s sleep in a week – 8hrs 7m. READING:SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Watched two episodes of LANDMAN, which were actually pretty good. I have a lot of time for Taylor Sheridan. YELLOWSTONE never quite landed with me, though I appreciate its craft and also that a part finally fits Kelly Reilly’s weird energy, but LANDMAN hits right for me, and the scripting is fascinating. Also seeing Colm Feore climbing inside a new skin was nice.
