Just before mid-December in Montana.

"Farting around" as Kurt says, and trying to not give a damn...

It’s almost mid-December, and soon the solstice. It’s a beautiful time. November gray is balanced with a little colder temps and a clarity of winter color that results, and though the snow hasn’t hit here yet, it will be coming soon. The mountains are getting snow higher up. It’s been nice.

And while dark very early, after the first few weeks of shock, the body adapts, and starts to regain energy. I get a season syndrome my wife jokingly calls “Sleep Disease” that kicks in every late fall, and lasts until about the solstice. I require far more sleep than normal. I also get this in the spring as days suddenly start to grow longer. I have no idea why it kicks in then. The fall makes sense, but the spring? It’s been this way for years. It took some time to recognize but now I know it’s coming and just go with it. Sleep Disease. You might get it too? I lean into it now, recognizing it for what it is.

This evening Acre and I went for a walk down the creek just as it was getting dark. Ice forming along the edges. The branches reaching up into the sky. The stars trying to pierce a thin layer of frozen sky in the atmosphere. The creek bank steep and jumbled, I decided to hop a few rocks going to an island and stepped into the water. My old boots, not being as sound as I assumed they might be, invited the water in and my right foot felt the cold damn near instantly. But I like the feeling of invasive cold. Cold makes me feel awake and as long as it’s not in the extreme cold temps, I know I’m fine even if I have a ways to walk. I’ve learned to embrace this sort of cold. I was half tempted to strip down and fully jump in. But I’ll save that for tomorrow morning. I’ve already been in once today.

Walking the creek I, no headphones, no voices, no signals, just the quiet nature around me. I started thinking about all the things I’ve encountered in the last week and what a challenge its going to be to navigate the internet in the next few years. As I walked the creek, I’m seeing a tiny fraction of a waterway that eventually works its way down to the Clark Fork where it later will join the Colombia River and spills into the Pacific Ocean, and my mind began to marvel at the dichotomy of my day, one half spent nearly completely focused inside a computer screen, my consciousness distributed inside a long invisible chain of electrons that extends synthetically around the globe to people I will not see, likely will not talk to, and the other portion, here, walking the creek, equally connected to all the electrons, but with such a difference of consciousness and focus. In one space my body is in the confines of walls, which are nice walls, and comfortable temperatures, but out here, walking moving through trees, moving through actual time and space, feels so wildly different. And better. The consciousness of the internet space is truly wild. A thing few really knew outside of video games and movies before the early aughts. And books. Books carry consciousness much in the same way. Different, but very similar in many regards.

But the internet is about to get weirder. A lot weirder. And fast.

With the advent of ai, and the new ability to create deceptive forms of information, we can not longer hold the axiom, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It simply won’t be possible anymore. Currently we can usually identify a fake display of a person and call bullshit on something by noticing the weird skin, or the extra fingers, or digital glitches that occur, but we are rapidly advancing to a time when we will not be able to discern visually what on the internet is real, and what is not.

A war in such and such place? The deception of the Gulf of Tonkin took place because it was on the other side of the world and we lacked the ability to verify what actually happened in real time. It took decades of people fighting bureaucratic walls to eventually glean the real story. The internet for a few years opened the possibility of seeing for ourselves in real time events that happened on the other side of the earth. But now… soon, very soon, it can all be deceived with even more ease. A ship won’t even be required. So when we hear about a war… Maybe. But maybe not. Drones in the sky? Maybe, or maybe not. Rapidly advancing weather event? Maybe. But maybe not.

Now, of course we have information lines in which we we’ll be able to test things. A storm in Indiana is verifiable if I call my family there and they can tell me about it or not, but with regards to mass information being distributed along the single most popular space we send it, the internet, we are about to enter the wild west of possibilities. Not only could a storm or tragedy be faked in a given location, but with mass surveillance / censorship possibilities anyone saying otherwise about said event could be immediately silenced via algorithm. So short of a phone call with an actual person you know and trust, we won’t know if a thing is true. Of course the 1984 trained part of my brain can also see a possibility where ai intercepts our call to our theoretical loved one, and knowing they will say something that goes against the dominating narratives, it imitates our loved one in a way that deceives us into believing the same lie on the internet. But I’m not quite so cynical yet as to distrust our phone lines, though it certainly is imaginable.

Now I understand that this initially sounds a bit paranoid, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s just being sensible to the possibilities. Between what we’ve learned about the Twitter files and the extensive censorship industrial complex, which has become so big, intricate, well funded, and wide spread that those that discuss it professionally do refer to as such… an “industrial complex,” and what we know about the coming potential for ai, it is simple math.

But I’m decidedly not a Doom & Gloomer. I was born this way. I like life too much to let the darkness get me down. I’ll go for a walk in it. Look for the stars. Winter has taught me this. I see hope. It’s a little radical to many, but I like it.

We live more intentionally outside the internet. It’s such an easy solution if you want it to be. It’s a little lonelier than what the internet feels, but the internet connections are mostly plastic. A few interactions are real, but for the most part it’s all a sugar high.

Out along the creek, moving my body intentionally through the cold air, up over rock, through the trees, balancing on tree roots where the water washed the soil away last spring, springing from rock to rock over the creek, and up the slick bank on the other side, my body feels truly alive, vibrant, and poised for living. It feels viable in a way that has gotten humans through life on earth for as long as we’ve been here. I do not feel the same when I’m in the internet.

I predict the smoothest path forward will involve simplicity. And I predict it is going to be a challenge to attain for those of us that want it. They are rigging the system in a direction antithetical to real life. But I don’t mind a challenge.

The current trend in technology is not simplicity. It is complexity. It is relying on ever more electronic manipulation to attain outcomes that we used to not rely on. It is making us ever more reliant on algorithms and infrastructure that is more easily manipulate and controlled by nefarious actors. For the most part it is run by those that are just trying to make a living, but the potential for negative manipulation within that technical system is about to explode. So my goal is to just be there less, and be in the real world more.

I’m not anti-tech. Hell, I love spaces like this, where I can connect with real world people who like thinking about life, who appreciate the beauty and inspire others with their work, art, or even just enthusiasm. But the larger system out there… I need less and less of it, and I trust it less daily.

The news has become so obviously overtaken by story tellers, ever working harder to manipulate their target audiences, if not in the specifics of stories, in the over all background of how life is defined. We are constantly told how to think about the world we live in. The news isn’t there to tell us what is happening, but rather is there to tell us what to think about, and how to think about it… even if it isn’t true.

I have a few friends I’ve talked to who look at me funny when I say that. Lawson, are you trying to tell me you don’t trust the main stream media? Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying.

It’s going to get tricky. We aren’t going to know what stories to trust and not trust for a while. We are going to more than ever need to have friends to call and talk to. We need to be out in the real world, evaluating for ourselves what we see playing out. But all of that is a good thing. Ultimately the truest life we can live is interacting with the real world. We are evolved to be among trees, fields, even city streets, but outside. We are meant to interact with our peers, our neighbors, our market vendors. All these complex steps being taken to separate everyone into their own isolated little bubbles is the antithesis of what it means to be human. It is not a waste of time to go to the store and shop for our food. That is a social interaction that defines what it is to be human.

I’m reminded of this quote from Kurt Vonnegut:

Because it’s true. We’ve come to let the technocrats define life on earth. I’m not having it. I’m not a futurist. I’m not stuck in the past. I live right now. I look around at what is at my disposal, and a lot of what I’m being told I need to think about I’m not interested in. A lot of the ways I’m told to spend my time don’t interest me. We all have to work to get through life and get what we want out of it, but once we’ve honed in on that, we can define for ourselves what and how we do it. Sure I could by a bookshelf, and spend days of my life working to pay for it, or I can use my hands and scrap wood and build something that may not be magazine perfect to look at, but why the hell would I care, I’ve built a thing, with my hands and brain, on my own, and that feels like one of the most human things I can do. If given the opportunity to spend extra days of my life in tunnel vision working on a computer to pay for thing I could otherwise be outside building with my own hands and worldly resources around me, I’m going to pick the later. Aesthetics be damned. Certainly this doesn’t go for everything. And that is the balance in life. Some things I’m willing to pay for. Other things I’m not. But I don’t need others telling me how to make this decision, or deciding for me. That is the part of life I want to participate in… In many regards I think this is a consummate American way of thinking. And I’m ok with that.

I’m tired of the baby sitting that comes with the internet. I’m tired of coming across endless sees of articles that in very succinct judgement tell me what to think about and how to think about it. And in an electronic world in which we will never be quite sure what we can and can’t trust, I plan on spending less time there. And after these first two decades with the internet at the front and center of our lives, I think it’s going to be a good shift. And I don’t think I’m alone.

There seems to be a movement of people in this regard. It may be a small movement, but I can see it happening. Some are moving to the country, learning to grow food, learning how to hunt and collect. All valuable experiences. But even in the more urban environments I predict a movement of people that simply want to be out and about, interacting with real people in real places. I think places like Substack are actually going to be a valuable gather place for this like minded people. The less you are online, the more value you find in the real people you know online. Lest we forget, it is still incredible to be able to communicate so quickly across geography and to share our thoughts and ideas with people around the world. The intention of the internet connection is good. It’s just that the whole system is about to be corrupted by the pirates of reality in the form of ai & censorship.

I get back home from the walk along the creek. Some frozen little crystals I see falling in the air, as if from the stars that are fully out now, and I can see the crystals twinkling in the soft glow of the Christmas lights that sparkle on our front porch. The little lights scattered in the darkness of winter trigger some very warm part of our human minds, something deep in our history of evolution.

Acre has brought home a massive stick from the creek, carrying it proudly at last a half mile. He puts it in the yard next to the other 20 from the last couple weeks. We’ll burn them soon.