How to power the AIs. It's a crazy new world.

Casey Handmer's Blog, How to Feed the AIs, March 12, 2024.

AIs use a LOT of power. Producing that power is one thing. Getting it to the AIs is another.

The challenge with grid development is that it’s a permitting and construction nightmare, and like many things in the West, has gotten extremely expensive and time consuming to execute. But the datacenters need power much sooner than conventional development can build new power plants and transmission lines – even if permitting, eminent domain, technology, and construction costs were a solved problem!

It is time to lift the constraint that a new data center must be attached to the grid. Instead, we can provide most of the power locally using “beyond the grid” renewable energy generation, backed up by batteries for energy storage overnight.

For example:

A 1 GW data center (containing roughly a million H100s!) would have a substantial footprint of 20,000 acres, almost all of that solar panels. The batteries for storage and data center itself would occupy only a few of those acres. This is in some sense analogous to a relatively compact city surrounded by extensive farmland to produce its food.

Of course future data centers will use more advanced and productive computers but their power consumption and heat generation will remain much the same. Radically more efficient panels, batteries, and computers will only increase the revenue per unit land used for this purpose.

The development cost of a 1 GW data center would be around $60b including the solar+battery power plant, and importantly the lead time and permitting complexity for each of the components: solar array, batteries, structures, racks, internet connection, and servers is about the same. This is in direct contrast to conventional on-grid power supply, whose capacity is nearly exhausted already.

Is this going to pave the Earth with solar?

My startup Terraform Industries looks to apply solar to produce synthetic fuel, consuming substantial amounts of land (though less than agriculture) in the process. Something like 2 billion acres, or 7% of Earth’s land surface area, would be sufficient to provide every man, woman, and child on Earth with US levels of oil and gas abundance and commensurate prosperity. It’s possible to imagine a future where people consume even more than that – widespread personal supersonic transport, for example – but ongoing conversion of land use away from intensive industrial agriculture toward inherently more productive solar synthetics is a clear net win for the environment.

Is this the case for solar AGI? It’s currently hard to imagine Nvidia and friends producing 100 billion or more H100s, but it’s also hard to imagine our collective demand for artificial intelligence will saturate. If we’re spending $60b on a 20,000 acre solar powered data center development, that’s about $3m/acre. Even if the land acquisition budget is only 3% of the budget at $100,000/acre, this is still substantially higher than essentially all land outside of major cities, including prime agricultural land. Is AI a solar panel maximizer, rather than a paperclip maximizer?

Will AIs prefer to live in space instead of on the Earth?

There's much more at the link, like this crazy-ass final paragraph:

It seems that AGI will create an irresistibly strong economic forcing function to pave the entire world with solar panels – including the oceans. We should probably think about how we want this to play out. At current rates of progress, we have about 20 years before paving is complete.

The energy costs of generative AI are currently large enough to impact the environment

David Derreby, The Growing Environmental Footprint Of Generative AI, Undark, Feb, 20, 24.

One of the things that David Hays impressed on me when I studied with him back in the 1970s is that computing, real computing, is a physical process. It requires physical resources and extends out in time. The emergence of generative AI makes that abundantly clear. From the article:

AI can run on many devices — the simple AI that autocorrects text messages will run on a smartphone. But the kind of AI people most want to use is too big for most personal devices, Dodge said. “The models that are able to write a poem for you, or draft an email, those are very large,” he said. “Size is vital for them to have those capabilities.”

Big AIs need to run immense numbers of calculations very quickly, usually on specialized Graphical Processing Units — processors originally designed for intense computation to render graphics on computer screens. Compared to other chips, GPUs are more energy-efficient for AI, and they’re most efficient when they’re run in large “cloud data centers” — specialized buildings full of computers equipped with those chips. The larger the data center, the more energy efficient it can be. Improvements in AI’s energy efficiency in recent years are partly due to the construction of more “hyperscale data centers,” which contain many more computers and can quickly scale up. Where a typical cloud data center occupies about 100,000 square feet, a hyperscale center can be 1 or even 2 million square feet.

Estimates of the number of cloud data centers worldwide range from around 9,000 to nearly 11,000. More are under construction. The International Energy Agency, or IEA, projects that data centers’ electricity consumption in 2026 will be double that of 2022 — 1,000 terawatts, roughly equivalent to Japan’s current total consumption.

However, as an illustration of one problem with the way AI impacts are measured, that IEA estimate includes all data center activity, which extends beyond AI to many aspects of modern life. Running Amazon’s store interface, serving up Apple TV’s videos, storing millions of people’s emails on Gmail, and “mining” Bitcoin are also performed by data centers. (Other IEA reports exclude crypto operations, but still lump all other data-center activity together.)

Yet:

Another complication is the fact that AI, unlike Bitcoin mining or online shopping, can be used to reduce humanity’s impacts. AI can improve climate models, find more efficient ways to make digital tech, reduce waste in transport, and otherwise cut carbon and water use. One estimate, for example, found that AI-run smart homes could reduce households’ CO2 consumption by up to 40 percent. And a recent Google project found that an AI fast-crunching atmospheric data can guide airline pilots to flight paths that will leave the fewest contrails.

Because contrails create more than a third of commercial aviation’s contribution to global warming, “if the whole aviation industry took advantage of this single A.I. breakthrough,” says Dave Patterson, a computer-science professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and a Google researcher, “this single discovery would save more CO₂e (CO₂ and other greenhouse gases) than the CO₂e from all A.I. in 2020.”

Patterson’s analysis predicts that AI’s carbon footprint will soon plateau and then begin to shrink, thanks to improvements in the efficiency with which AI software and hardware use energy. One reflection of that efficiency improvement: as AI usage has increased since 2019, its percentage of Google data-center energy use has held at less than 15 percent. And while global internet traffic has increased more than twentyfold since 2010, the share of the world’s electricity used by data centers and networks increased far less, according to the IEA.

However, data about improving efficiency doesn’t convince some skeptics, who cite a social phenomenon called “Jevons paradox”: Making a resource less costly sometimes increases its consumption in the long run.

There's more at the link.

Is Lake Erie a juridical person? The voters will decide.

Timothy Williams, Should a Lake Get Legal Rights Like a Person? Toledo Voters Will Decide. NYTimes, February 17, 2019.

The failing health of Lake Erie, the world’s 11th largest lake, is at the heart of one of the most unusual questions to appear on an American ballot: Should a body of water be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person?

Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will be asked this month to decide whether Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, has the legal right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”

The peculiar ballot question comes amid a string of environmental calamities at the lake — poisonous algal blooms in summer, runoff containing fertilizer and animal manure, and a constant threat from invasive fish. But this special election is not merely symbolic. It is legal strategy: If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf.

The proposed Lake Erie Bill of Rights is part of a growing number of efforts to carve out legal status for elements of nature, including rivers, forests, mountains and even wild rice. The efforts, which began decades ago but have gathered momentum in recent years, seek to show that existing laws are insufficient to protect nature against environmental harm. Under current law, lakes and deserts do not have legal standing, so people cannot sue on their behalf. [...]

Tamaqua Borough, Pa., in the center of the state’s historic coal-mining region, was the first place in the nation to approve a rights-of-nature ordinance in 2006 after it banned companies from dumping dredged minerals and sewage sludge into open pit mines.

The bill approved by the borough council included language that said corporations could not “interfere with the existence and flourishing of natural communities or ecosystems, or to cause damage” to them within the township.

Four years later, Pittsburgh approved a rights-of-nature ordinance that prohibited fracking in city limits.

Santa Monica, Calif., has since passed an ordinance that requires the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish.”

And earlier this year, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota announced that it had granted wild rice its own legal rights, including “the right to pure water.”

Shades of object-oriented ontology (OOO)!

The disaster that is palm oil, or: Look before you freakin' leap!

Abrahm Lustgarten, Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe. NYTimes Magazine, November 20, 2018.

Most of the plantations around us [in Borneo] were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. In the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.

The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.

Tyler Cowen on wealth, coal, space, AI, & stuff

Rob Wiblin interviews Tyler Cowen about his latest book, Stubborn Attachments.

The core:

WIBLIN: If I had to pick out 50 words from the book that summarized it, I would choose this quote from page 32, which is, “We can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance. Namely: number one, what can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? Number two, what can we do to make civilization more stable? And number three, how should we deal with environmental problems?”

Does that seem like a key quote to you, as well?

COWEN: Absolutely.

Wealth and growth:

COWEN: I’d rather have a pocket calculator. I do think population will stabilize and start to decline, though probably not by very much. If you take Earth with, say, an average of 10 billion people lasting for centuries, but not lasting for 50,000 years, and do the calculations, you’d get at my modal prediction.

WIBLIN: But there’s many more of them than there is of us.

COWEN: That’s right.

WIBLIN: Do you think that quality of life will also go up, with high probability?

COWEN: Not forever, but for the foreseeable future. We’re in the period right now. We’re doing more to improve living standards than the world ever has before. That will have big ups and downs, but I don’t see why it has to stop.

WIBLIN: What about people who say, “I don’t care about welfare that much, I care about other things.” Do you think this argument for long termism goes through for them as well?

COWEN: I think it does. I have some early books, some of them on the arts, that argue wealth is good for aesthetic values. It depends what other values people care about, but wealth supports many different opportunities.

The whole point of wealth is to enable a kind of diversity and choice within a framework where, if there’s some other thing that people value, we can have more of that too.

WIBLIN: Do you think, like me, that there’s a chance that a future technology could make human life just a hundred or a thousand times better than it is for people today?

COWEN: I don’t know that we have a meaningful metric for saying that, but I suppose I don’t think that’s possible. I think we can make it twice as good and quite a bit longer, but I don’t think it will be inconceivable to what we can imagine now. [...]

WIBLIN: In the book, and, I guess, here so far, you’ve been focusing overwhelmingly on the importance of increasing economic growth, kind of getting to a better future faster. When we’re talking about growth here, we might imagine time on the X axis and welfare being generated in the universe on the Y axis, and you want to increase that faster.

Why focus on increasing the rate rather than making sure that that doesn’t go to zero?

COWEN: Well, keep in mind the core recipe is the rate of sustainable economic growth. If it’s going to go to zero, you’re knocked out of the box. So you’re maximizing across both of those dimensions, and I think, empirically, there are a large class of cases where more growth and more stability come together.

National defense is the easiest way to see that. If your society stays poor, someone will take you over. And those who take you over are probably nasty and will harm you. It’s not the only way in which growth and sustainability come together. But at most margins, they do. So there’s a wide enough class of cases where we can do both things at the same time.

Space travel:

WIBLIN: Let’s say that humans do continue for thousands, perhaps millions of years, but for some reason, we decide to never leave Earth. So we don’t use the resources that are available elsewhere.

COWEN: Which would be my prediction, by the way.

WIBLIN: Okay.

COWEN: I think space is overrated.

WIBLIN: Okay. It seems that, in your view, that should be a horrific tragedy, that almost all the value that humanity could have created had been lost in that case.

COWEN: Space is hard, right?

WIBLIN: I’m not so sure, but go on.

COWEN: It’s far, there are severe physical strains your subject to while you’re being transported, communication back and forth takes a very long time under plausible scenarios limited by the speed of light. And what’s really out there? Maybe there are exoplanets, but when you have to construct atmosphere, there’s a risk diversification argument for doing it.

But simply being under the ocean or high up in the sky or distant corners of the earth, we’re not about to run out of space or anything close to it. So I don’t really see what’s the economic reason to have something completely external, say, to the solar system.

WIBLIN: It seems you’re okay with the idea that we can turn more matter and more energy into more value. So what is it? Five times by 10 to the 22 stars out there in the accessible universe at the moment? Literally, as the galaxies recede, it’s declining by about a billionth per year.

But if you’re in favor of growth and creating more value, it seems like almost all the value . . . No matter what you value, it has to be out there in all of that matter that we can reorganize. Given your desire for growth on Earth, I don’t understand how it could be the case that you wouldn’t be upset that we might just stop at the boundaries of Earth’s atmosphere.

COWEN: Oh, I’m upset about it, I’m just not very optimistic. If you put me in the legislature, I’ll vote to increase funding for space exploration. But relative — especially in the Bay Area — relative to other people I speak to in this kind of fringe group of intellectuals who think about space, I’m more pessimistic than just about all of them.

But it’s also that I’m more optimistic about the earth. The ocean of course is enormous — it could be platforms, it could be underwater. Deserts, places that can be terraformed, cities in the sky — you do want diversification, protection against a big nuclear war. Maybe for that you need other planets. There’s the moon, there’s Mars — they’re actually big enough to have diversification.

Intersectionality:

COWEN: Intersectionality is grossly underrated by people on the right. Intersectionality I take to be the notion that if you’re a member of more than one either minority group or group that’s discriminated against, your multiple membership in discriminated groups creates problems for you in a potentially nonlinear fashion.

Social justice warriors on the left far overstate the problems of intersectionality. It’s an idea that ought to be considered important. It should be embraced by the middle and not attacked or celebrated on the two extremes. So the idea is not where it should be. It’s become overly politicized. We need to resurrect a more sensible version of it.

Tyler Cowen interviews Charles C. Mann on Shaping Tomorrow’s World and the Limits to Growth

I think it’s impossible to overrate him. Jackie Chan’s amazing.

From Conversations with Tyler, HERE.

Air pollution:

COWEN: And in your book [The Wizard and the Prophet], environmental optimism versus environmental pessimism is a recurring theme. On this issue of the millions of deaths from air pollution, are you an optimist or a pessimist?

MANN: Oh, I think I’m an optimist on this. This one is a problem that we have a clear idea how to resolve. There are obvious substitutes that would be much better than the kind of kerosene that you see in Indian villages. So I think this is a totally lickable problem. There are other ones that I’m much more worried about.

Carbon issues:

COWEN: And on carbon issues overall, are you an optimist or a pessimist? And why?

MANN: Well, I’d say, if you think about it, in 1800, look at the situation of the world: We’re vastly poorer; a huge portion of the earth’s population is enslaved in one way or another. There’s actually estimates from people like Adam Hochschild that it’s three-quarters of the earth’s population. I think that seems high, but you get the general idea. Women aren’t allowed to own property, I think, anywhere. They aren’t allowed to go to college, you name it.

Our world has totally transformed in the last 200 years. Slavery was one of the foundational institutions of civilization. So to me, it would just be incredibly disappointing. Carbon in the air seems, by comparison to slavery, a much easier challenge, although it’s not to say a small one.

COWEN: And what do you think the solution will look like?

MANN: I think there’s multiple possible solutions, and that’s, in fact, what the argument of the book is. There’s different ways to go about it, and it really depends on what kind of future you want to have.

If you’re what I call a wizard — maybe I should call them, to be more exact, what would it be? A Schumpeterian meliorist or something like technophiliac meliorist or something.

COWEN: Okay.

MANN: So I call them wizards. You want to have big, centralized, super efficient facilities, and that typically translates into nuclear power.

If you’re a prophet — typical environment movement — you don’t like these giant, centralized facilities in and of themselves, and you want smaller and much more networked systems. And that looks like a complete reconstruction of the grid to use solar and wind, as well as lots and lots and lots of planting.

Both of them — from the point of view of today’s technology — are equally impossible. It’s a leap in the dark no matter what we do, but then that’s the human condition, isn’t it?

Water:

MANN: And it is absolutely true that people waste staggering amounts of water, and this is the kind of thing that people who study water, like Peter Gleick and the Pacific Institute, they tear their hairs out about all the different ways that we waste water.

Seventy percent of the world’s water, or something like that, goes to agriculture. Most of that is for irrigation, and estimates in the amount of water that’s lost and just totally wasted in irrigation range up to 70 percent of that. So 70 percent of 70 percent, you’re getting close to half the world’s water just wasted. So they say all the things you should do, which you were just talking about, which is charge people, act intelligent about this.

Opposing this is the fact that people are not rational [laughs] about water and have never been, as far as I can tell. When people feel water is threatened, they want more. So then their view is to do these giant mega projects. Like Israel, for example, has just built these huge desalination plants all over the Mediterranean coast. They have five big ones and they plan to build three more.

There’s another one that’s going to be in Aqaba in Jordan — it’s even larger. California has 20 of these planned. And then these mega projects, which I think from a strictly economic cost-benefit or benefit-cost point of view, are kind of crazy, given the wastage. But there’s a real pull toward doing that, and I just don’t know how it’s going to come out.

[Privatizing water companies] is a solution that should be on the table in many more places than it is, because the fact is that governments at every level have failed with water systems, and almost anything would be better than that.

The earth is finite, no?

MANN: ...So clearly, there is some limit somewhere. But where it is, we just don’t really have a clue.

One of the arguments I actually point out in this book is that there’s this idea, right at the beginning of the environmental movement, which is making this argument that we can’t do everything we want, that there’s carrying capacity. It has a whole bunch of different names — ecological limits, planetary boundaries — gets dressed up in different guises.

But the whole idea is that there’s these fixed points that we cannot surpass. Yet, when you look at it, the argument, however intuitively appealing — and it’s enormously intuitively appealing because the earth is round and it’s finite — is very, very difficult to substantiate. And you could, because it depends on what you consider those limiting factors to be.

In fact, one of the earliest calculations of this was done by the great physicist and mathematician Warren Weaver, and he said, “Well, the usable energy is what we need.” And there’s just an inordinate amount of energy coming in from the sun.

The Urban Pastoral

April 1, 2011: Another piece from the old days at The Valve. I figure if we're going to transform our urban environments, we've got to take ownership of them. And that means we've got to find the beauty in them as they are now. Only then will we be prepared to deal with them rather than wishing them away. I've got a bunch of photos that I've posted under the urban pastoral rubric. Note: Still relevant, August 30, 2017.

It was in graduate school, I believe, that I heard someone refer to Hart Crane as a poet of the “urban pastoral,” referring, I believe to his collection “The Bridge” – which I’ve not read. That was the first time I heard the phrase, “urban pastoral,” and it has stuck in my mind. But it hasn’t done much until the past year when I began wandering my Jersey City neighborhood, camera in hand, in search of wild graffiti.

I photographed the graffiti, of course – lot’s of it – but that’s not all. I photographed other things as well, close-ups of bees and flowers, panoramas of this or that neighborhood view, of the Manhattan skyline from Jersey City, and even sunrises and sunsets. Thus a month and a half ago I blogged “This Jersey City My Prison,” in which I set Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” amid photographs taken in Jersey City.

Coleridge wrote the poem while he was confined to the yard in his cottage in Britain’s fabled lake country. He was feeling sorry for himself because he had to miss a nature walk with his friends. Through identifying with his friend “gentle-hearted Charles!” who had “pined/ And hunger’d after nature, many a year,/ In the great City pent” Coleridge had managed to work himself out of a funk. Coming to a close, Coleridge asserts:

Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!

Indeed.

I, however, did not post my blog entry from a cottage in the lake country. I posted it from my apartment in Jersey City, a half dozen blocks from the Holland Tunnel, conduit to one of the largest cities in the world, one of a kind Coleridge could not have imagined.

The curse of parking

Clive Thompson in Mother Jones:

The average automobile spends 95 percent of its time sitting in place. People buy cars because they need to move around, but the amount of time they actually do move around is tiny. So the cars are parked, and in multiple spaces: A car owner needs a spot near home, but also spots near other places he or she might go—the office, a shopping mall, Epcot.

A 2011 study at the University of California-Berkeley found that the United States has somewhere close to a billion parking spots. Since there are only 253 million passenger cars and light trucks in the country, that means we have roughly four times more parking spaces than vehicles. If you totaled up all the area devoted to parking, it'd be roughly 6,500 square miles, bigger than Connecticut.

And finding one of the parking spaces is a PITA:

And worst of all may be the emissions that parking causes. Studies have found that anywhere from about 30 to 60 percent of the cars you see driving around a downtown core are just circling, looking for an open space to claim. (An IBM survey found that worldwide, urban drivers spend an average of 20 minutes per trip looking for parking.)

But:

We are, [some experts] say, on the cusp of a new era, when cities can begin dramatically reducing the amount of parking spaces they offer. This shift is being driven by a one-two punch of social and technological change. On the social side, people are increasingly opting to live in urban centers, where they don't need—or want—to own a car. They're ride-sharing or using public transit instead.

And technologically, we're seeing the rapid emergence of self-driving cars. Google's models have traveled more than a million miles with almost no accidents, and experts expect that fully autonomous vehicles will hit the consumer market as early as a decade from now. [...]

One study suggests a single self-driving car could replace up to 12 regular vehicles. Indeed, many urbanists predict that fleets of robocars could become so reliable that many, many people would choose not to own automobiles, causing the amount of parking needed to drop through the floor.

"Parking has been this sacred cow that we couldn't touch—and now we can touch it," says Gabe Klein, who has headed the transportation departments in Chicago and Washington, DC. He sees enormous potential—all that paved-over space suddenly freed up for houses and schools, plazas and playgrounds, or just about anything. "All that parking could go away, and then what happens?" he asks. "You unlock a tremendous amount of value."

Pope Francis on the Environmental Crisis

An article in the NYTimes opens:

Pope Francis on Thursday called for a radical transformation of politics, economics and individual lifestyles to confront environmental degradation and climate change, as his much-awaited papal encyclical blended a biting critique of consumerism and irresponsible development with a plea for swift and unified global action.

The vision that Francis outlined in the 184-page encyclical is sweeping in ambition and scope: He described a relentless exploitation and destruction of the environment, for which he blamed apathy, the reckless pursuit of profits, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness. The most vulnerable victims are the world’s poorest people, he declared, who are being dislocated and disregarded.

It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, this encyclical will have on world affairs. The Pope, of course, is not the first public figure to speak out on climate, and it takes more than words to change the world.

But a papal encyclical is not a speech or a white paper, it is the official expression of an institution whose history stretches back two millennia and whose constitutions live on every continent and speak a multitude of tongues. It is thus transnational in scope in a way that perhaps no other document is. And it is a teaching document (emphasis mine):

Francis has made clear that he hopes the encyclical will influence energy and economic policy and stir a global movement. He calls on ordinary people to pressure politicians for change. Bishops and priests around the world are expected to lead discussions on the encyclical in services on Sunday. But Francis is also reaching for a wider audience when in the first pages of the document he asks “to address every person living on this planet.”

Will that happen? And not just on this Sunday, but on many Sundays after, Saturdays too, and Wednesday evenings.

In part we can measure the impact of Laudato Si (Praise Be to You) by the opposition it provokes.

Yet Francis has also been sharply criticized by those who question or deny the established science of human-caused climate change and also by some conservative Roman Catholics, who have interpreted the document as an attack on capitalism and as unwanted political meddling at a moment when climate change is high on the global agenda.

Working Paper: Reading Morton’s Hyperobjects

I've collected my Hyperobjects posts into a working paper: Reading Morton's Hyperobjects.

Abstract: Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, takes global warming as the starting point for a philosophical investigation our current moment. The world as we’d conceived it is over; the world we’re now living in is a strange one. Time and space aren’t empty containers and objects aren’t simple. We aren’t separate from the universe, nor it from us. Quantum mechanics, relativity, climate modeling, phase spaces, environmental art, nuclear waste, Morton covers them all.

Introduction: Hyperobjects as Concrete Universals

We live in apocalyptic times. But then, in a sense, all times are apocalyptic, for all times have births and deaths, and at many scales.

As I read it, Hyperobjects uses global warming as the paradigm case of a hyperobject. It is massively distributed in time and space and, when we finally found it, we found that we’d been living inside it for decades and centuries. It is at once here and now and a long way into the future.

How big is here and how big is now?

Those questions ask for one sort of answer if you conceive of time and space as empty containers, the classical view that Morton rejects. They’re whole different kettle of fish if you think of time and space as emanating from objects. And if the objects turn out to be hyperobjects – which is where Morton ends up – then they emanate time and space on all the scales at which the objects exist.

Many times and spaces enmeshed with one another.

Global warming is concrete, it is real. In that it is a hyperobject, and all objects are hyperobjects, it would seem to follow that global warming is a universal condition of time and space emanating from the many here-and-nows.

Take Leibniz’s world of monads and, for each monad, swap in a hyperobject, one existing on multiple scales. That’s Morton’s hyperuniverse.

Does THAT make any sense? No more sense that sacralizing nuclear waste, as Morton advocates – how else will we properly attend to it?

Of course not, but there isa logic to it.

For it is a mistake to read Hyperobjects as a discursive argument whose multiple propositions can be neatly separated from their verbal form. They can’t and it isn’t.

Hyperobjects is a performance and asks to be read as such. How you get there is as important as where you end up. And where you end up is where you started. You see, it’s a hyperobject and your path is a viscous circle, sticking to you as you doggedly stick to the reading.

As you read Hyperobjects you must be mindful, mindful of all that passes in array, accumulating connections as you move on through. That’s what this is about, moving through the world as it slips over the side and into the sea.

* * * * *

When I wrote “Hyperobjects and the Thinking of Timothy Morton” I had no intention of reading my way through the book; I didn’t even have a copy of it. I just wanted to comment on Ursula Heise’s gently devastating review and explain how, given that he was deep in a world I’d walked away from in my intellectual youth, I’d come to take Morton seriously. Nor had I any intention of reading the book when I posted a follow-up: “‘Hyperobject’ as Concept and as Rhetorical Device.” That’s where I explained that Morton’s thinking is a process one steps into, not an enumeration of propositions one takes away from.

And I was stuck. Morton asked me if I’d read the book and, if not, he’d send me a copy. It arrived, and I started reading. As I read, so I posted. In order. For awhile.

And I managed to ride some of my own hobby horses in the process: Disney’s ponk elephants in “What does real mean?”, the Marx Brothers in “Pardon Me”, and chaos/complexity in “High Dimensional Spaces” (complete with illustrations).

Then I saw an opportunity to write a formal reivew for my upcoming column in 3 Quarks Daily. To do that, though, I sorta’ had to finish the whole book, and write about it, whole. That became the 5th post in the series, though I cribbed some prose from the first.

At that point I started wondering just how much longer I wanted to keep this up. I had material for at least three or four most posts, but by then I’d decided I wanted to move on to Matt Jockers’ Macroanalysis. I made some decisions and decided to end it with the post on objectification and objects. One the one hand, the issue was central to my thinking – it was my concern about objectification that motivated my interest in object oriented ontology – but it connects with Jockers work as well. He doesn’t talk of hyperobjects, but his data manipulations visualize the outlines and skeletons of hypobjects, very abstract and tenebrous ones at that: the collective mind, anyone?

Time to move on.

“Hyperobject” as Concept and as Rhetorical Device

When I first started reading Tim Morton’s posts on hyperobjects, I found the concept rather puzzling. For that matter, I found his usage of “object” puzzling as well.

My basic sense of “object”, after all, is grounded in the human-scale objects of the mundane world: that lamp to my left, the mini-fridge behind me, my Calicchio trumpet, those jeans draped over the bedstead, and so forth. And now Morton wants me to think of global warming as an object? A hyperobject? Strange.

The thing is, mundane objects are given in ordinary perception, but global warming, no way. You can date its beginning however you will – it’s not something with a sharp moment of origin – but, wherever you settle it, it’s been around long before we were able to conceptualize and thus perceive it. That conceptualization required a great deal of sophisticated observation, analysis, modeling, and computer simulation undertaken by a large and scattered community of scientists.

And now, in effect, and for purposes both practical and metaphysical, what Morton wants us to do is to pack all of that up into a unit that we can treat pretty much like a mundane object, a stone, a leaf, or a beach ball. Ontologically it’s the same kind of thing. They’re all objects.

That takes getting used to. A hyperobject is really just an object, no more, no less. But a strange object. What the “hyper” prefix does, in effect, as serve as a marker, a reminder, for all that packing-up.

I spent awhile trying to get a sense of just what the definitional criteria were. In a review of Hyperobjects Tom White sums them up: “viscosity, non-locality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity.” Just what that means is not exactly clear. But that’s OK.

Hyperobjects and the Thinking of Timothy Morton

Ursula Heise has a critical review of Morton’s Hyperobjects in, well, Critical Inquiry. But I’m ahead of myself, just a bit.

I first met Morton at Stanford’s Arcade and was drawn-in. I started reading his posts and thought them crazy, but intriguing. When he started writing about hyperobjects I went nuts. Well, not really, not quite. Nor did I know who this Graham Harman fellow was that he kept referring to, the withdrawal ninja. Object Oriented Ontology sounded strange, but though Continental philosophy nurtured me in my intellectual youth, it’s long sounded strange to me.

At one point I offered a query/critique to one of his posts – which you won’t find there now, as Arcade seems to have scrubbed its blogs of comments (why?). He’d offered plutonium as a bog-standard hyperobject – it's all over the damn universe and thus massive in scale, long half-life and thus massive in time: characteristics of hyperobjects – and dwelled on its weirdness. And THAT bugged me: why this weirdness fixation? So I asked him about it, offering sodium or chlorine (I forget just what) as examples: Aren’t they also massively distributed in time and space, live long, but not weird (they’re the constituents of table salt)? His reply: Well, there you go.

Not satisfactory, but then it was also clear that he wasn’t about to give me the kind of satisfaction my query sought. So I decided not to go there any more.

I continued to read his posts, got ahold of Harman’s book on Latour, started reading (and blogging about) Latour, went to the 2011 OOO meeting in NYC (across the river from my beloved Jersey City), where Harman told me that The Quadruple Object would give me his philosophy in a nutshell, blogged a post in which I nominated three phenomena for consideration as hyperobjects: the world-wide graffiti wall, the music-making group, and the literary text (as extended through the minds of readers).

From half a billion years ago

The horseshoe crab is half a billion years old, but its existence may be threatened.

The Dutch on Water: Let It Flow

The New York Times, How to Think Like the Dutch in a Post-Sandy World:

In the Netherlands, a man named Henk Ovink offered to be Donovan’s guide. Ovink was the director of the office of Spatial Planning and Water Management, meaning, essentially, that it was his job to keep the famously waterlogged country dry. As he learned about various Dutch innovations, Donovan was struck by the fact that Ovink looked at water as much in cultural as in engineering terms, which was a function of the centuries-old need of the Dutch to act together for protection.

Think like a community:

Beyond that, Ovink feared that politics might undermine any chance to encourage new thinking about water management. “When I mentioned climate change to one official,” he said, “she almost hit me.” He characterized some of the wishful thinking he believed he would be dealing with as: “Don’t hire a Dutchman — believe in angels.”

Dutch battles against water led his country to develop a communal society. To this day, Water Boards, which date to the Middle Ages, are a feature of every region, and they guide long-term infrastructural planning. American individualism, on the other hand, has yielded a system in which each municipality has a great deal of autonomy, making regional cooperation difficult.

Pacific Avenue in Jersey City, the day after Sandy

The Anthropocene in Pictures

That's us, or rather our impact on the physical disposition of the planet. Here's how it goes:

the Pleistocene, 2.5 million years ago to 12 thousand years ago, saw the emergence of humans from clever apes. 

the Holocene, 12 thousand years ago to to 1800 AD, from agriculture to industry and the emergence of loosely integrate world order of human commerce and exchange; 

and now the Anthropocene, 1800 AD the present and into the future, when industry started pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, little knowing the consequences.

The anthropocene is mapped out in images of the earth at Globaïa. H/t Tim Morton.

Chapter 1 of the New Latour Available, Apocalypse Awaits

Sorta.

Catherine Porter is translating Latour’s An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence to be published by Harvard University Press in 2013. A provisional translation of the introduction and first chapter is now available at Latour’s website (link at bottom of the page).

I’ve just started reading it. As the first page is strongly marked “NOT FOR QUOTATION” I won’t. But I will say that the opening is JUST SO.

Latour talks of a recent meeting where a climate scientist is explaining climate change to a small group of on the whole sympathetic industrialists and businessmen. One of them asks why they should believe that scientists rather than the skeptics. The scientist pauses for a bit and then observes that if people don’t trust the institutions of science, we’re in trouble. He then launches into an explanation of how those institutions work and points out that the skeptics have no comparable institutional infrastructure.

Latour observes—and I believe he’s right about this—that only five or ten years ago such a researcher would have invoked Science itself, not the institution, and he certainly would not have gone into an account of how the institution works.

That’s pretty much as far as I’ve gotten into the introduction, a scant three pages. So I don’t know what Latour went on to say, though he did say that the researcher was quite right to make the answer that he did, and that despite the fact that those institutions are frightfully complex. It’s as though—I’m speaking in my own voice now—under the dual pressure of climate chaos caused mostly by carbon emissions and skepticism about the consequences, Science has decided that it must come clean about its inner workings, must cease presenting itself as a secular theology to be taken on faith by the unwashed masses.

Could this, I wonder, be what’s driving the new atheists, outrage that their science is no longer being taken on faith, that they are being asked by the public to explain themselves?

But that’s an aside.

Nature's variations on a graffiti theme

July 6, 2007

This is one of my favorite graffiti subjects. It's in the Erie Cut in the middle of Jersey City. No one goes down there except graffiti writers, homeless people, and urban explorers. For about a year construction workers went used the cut as a way to move things and stuff to and from a construction site at the West end. But that's over.

October 31, 2007

There's a least two visible layers on this wall. The older layer has those flyer saucer things and the whitish background. The newer layer has Hemlock written across the bottom. I suspect that the bubbles are background for Hemlock rather than a third layer.

Could New York City Protect Itself with Barriers?

In the past few years proposals have been floated to protect the NYC area from flodding by putting large gates into New York Bay. The gates would lie in the seafloor most of the time but would be raised into place during a major storm, such as Sandy. The NYTimes writes:

[Brian A. Colle] said that if gates had been placed in strategic spots like the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey, they would have protected some of the areas that were swamped by floodwaters, including the edges of Lower Manhattan, low-lying areas of Brooklyn and Queens and the western part of Staten Island, as well as Jersey City and Hoboken, N.J.

“The idea is that you raise these barriers, and anywhere inside of that you’re basically protected,” Dr. Colle said, adding, “With a solid barrier, we basically can have business as usual in Lower Manhattan.”

But vexing questions remain. Would industries tolerate immense disruption from the construction of barriers in the city’s busy waterways? Would residents object to the marring of vistas? With climate change advancing, can scientists accurately predict the size of hurricanes that the sea gates would one day have to withstand?

And where would the $10 billion-plus in construction money come from? Even a study — taking into account the complexity of New York waterways, projections in the rise in sea levels and other factors — would take years and millions of dollars.

The scientists and engineers who have worked on conceptual designs for the city say a comprehensive study is needed on what would be the most effective locations and the most practical type of barriers — whether they swing close like a driveway gate or pivot up from the ocean floor, for example.

A feasibility study by the Army Corps of Engineers, which would have jurisdiction, would require authorization from Congress.

“A lot of things need to be taken into consideration before we throw up a giant wall,” said Chris Gardner, a spokesman for the corps.

What strikes me as that time to do the preliminary study and then the actual construction is on the order of significant climate change due to global warming. Thus one can imagine that the climate is changing fast enough that such gates would be obsolete by the time they're built. These gates make sense ONLY if we take major steps to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Otherwise it's just more wishful techno-dreaming.

Apocalypse Now: Sandy Dominates My Weltanschauung

Big word that: Weltanschauung. It means world view, a comprehensive top-to-bottom, right-to-left, inside-and-outside account of the world. Well, hurricane Sandy changed my world. She deserves a Big Word.

Now, physically, me and my stuff are now OK. But as I type this I hear noise created by the generator at the firehouse behind my building. The street it faces doesn't have electric power. That firehouse is my polling place today. I assume the generator will power the electronic voting machine.

Tomorrow we're supposed to get an ordinary winter storm, one of those storms that're variously delightful, if you like snow, or merely irritating if you don't. But this one is coming on top of Sandy, and Jersey City has not even remotely recovered from her. So the impact of this new storm could be harmful, especially for those still without power.

Given this, it is thus something of a shock when I go online to the various places I haunt and discuss and find that those discussions aren't dominated by Sandy. Why not? Because most folks don't live in an area that's been crushed by Sandy. She doesn't dominate their Weltanschuung.

For me and my neighbors, we got a taste of the apocalypse. For the rest of the world, life goes on.

Thoughts on Sandy: We Must Change Our Ways, NOW

I didn’t really think much about hurricane Sandy until I went grocery shopping on Sunday afternoon, October 28. The fact that Irene hadn’t hit Jersey City as bad as had been predicted meant little about Sandy. And I knew that. But still, how bad could it be? So I didn’t stock up on batteries, candles, and non-perishable food. Thus it’s a matter of luck that I had enough to get through four-and-a-half days without power.

Of course, I also had friends, June Jones in particular. A number of people met at her place for meals. She was cooking up a storm. Without power the food in her freezer would spoil quickly. She decided to cook it up and had her friends and family over.

Thanks, June!

And then there’s my friends at the Villain. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I got home from shopping on Sunday afternoon and spent some more time on my Halloween costume: Trash Master. I was coming down the home stretch on it and figured it would be ready in plenty of time for the Halloween party we were throwing for the kids in the garden.

Did some more work on the costume on Monday and more this and that. Took some photos of wind whipping through the garden (see above) and planned my work for the rest of the week. Around 8:30 PM or so that evening the power flickered and then went out. But it came back in a minute or so. Every once in awhile I could feel the building shake. At 9:05 PM the power went out again, and didn’t come back.

Not to worry. I was ready for bed anyhow—I’m going to bed early these days, and getting up early, too, as always. I figured the power would be back when I woke up, or later that day.

I woke up Monday morning to darkness. I had some breakfast, grabbed my camera, and hit the streets by 6:45 AM. Very few lights were on anywhere. That was NOT a good sign, not good at all. Oh, some big buildings had lights on, buildings with generators no doubt. But mostly things were dark, in Jersey City AND in Manhattan.