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About ten years ago, back in 2015, all 195 countries of the world signed the Paris Agreement, in which the nations agreed to limit global warming due to anthropogenic climate change to "well below" 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to make efforts to keep it below 1.5°C. These agreed limits were aimed for the year 2100, two or three generations in the future, around 75 years from now.

In June, NASA reported that all of the last 12 months had set temperature records, and 11 of them surpassed the 1.5°C mark. The average global temperature from June 2023 to May 2024 was 1.63°C above the pre-industrial level. Today, mind you — not as foreseen by politics and climate science at some point in the future in the year 2100.

The IPCC calculates the relevant global average temperature, which the Paris Agreement is based on, using a 20-year average; with the drawback that it only becomes definitively known after 10 years whether and when we reach and exceed certain values and limits. However, there are statistical alternatives that give more weight to values closer in time, allowing us to make meaningful statements today about whether and when certain values will be reached.

Carbon Brief has applied such alternative statistical methods to global temperature values from different datasets and calculated when we will approximately reach and exceed the non-binding global warming limits of the Paris Agreement.

Spoiler alert: It is not in the year 2100, nor a few years before that:

(Our) approach suggests that the world will pass 1.5C around the year 2030 (representing the 50th percentile, or central estimate, of all the model runs), with a range of anywhere from 2028 (5th percentile) up to 2036 (95th percentile).

Similarly, the world will pass 2C around the year 2048, with a range of 2040 to 2062 across all models assessed.

To be clear: The global limits targeted in the Paris Agreement will be reached in about 10 and 25 years respectively according to this statistical method, not in 75 years. And ofcourse: We can go way above those limits, easily, just give it enough time.

At the same time, a report by consulting firms KPMG and Kearney finds another record consumption of fossil fuel energy in 2023, which rose by 1.5% from the previous year's level. On track.

Meanwhile, climate policy worldwide is being weakened, conservative politicians pretend to be clueless in the face of flood disasters, and climate activists end up in jail for trivial offenses and civil disobedience. In Mecca, over 1,000 people die during the Hajj, where temperatures have been over 50°C for days, U.S. cities like Phoenix and New Orleans reach life-threatening temperatures despite prevailing air conditioning, and New Delhi sets a new temperature record for India at 52.3°C degrees — with over 100 deaths so far. These are just some few headlines from the past days, i have an extreme weather markdown file containing dozens of them for this year alone. A UN survey of 75,000 participants from 77 countries found that concern about climate change has "never been greater."

When, ten years ago, we as a global community (of course completely non-bindingly) agreed to limit global warming due to human-caused climate change to 2/1.5°C by 2100 and to do everything possible to achieve it, the well-known climatologist and former NASA scientist James Hansen, who in 1988 was the first to warn the US Congress about the consequences of unchecked climate change, said the agreement was "a fraud, really," it was "bullshit" and "worthless words."

There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.

And as long as that is the case, we will set new temperature records every year, revise statistical projections, and mourn further fatalities. Nobody seen this coming.

UPGRADE

Peter Frankopan - The Earth transformed - An untold history (dt. Zwischen Erde und Himmel: Klima - Eine Menschheitsgeschichte) ★★★★★ A riveting world history retold through the lense of environmental changes and climate which tries to integrate our knowledge about them into history as a foundational layer that was, until now, largely ignored. Frankopan largely succeeds with this reevaluation of history, and manages to fuse a world history that takes history of (mostly) Africa, South America and China into account with a history of human extractivism and exploitation of nature. Despite being a whopping 900 page tomb, it's accessible and it unfolds like the famous hockey stick graph: We get hundreds of interesting pages about the ever increasing exploitation of nature, accompanied by historic episodes of climate change and their impact on human economies throughout world history, only to be presented with an explosion of pollution and extraction after the start of industrialization, which culminates in the sheer suicidal trajectory of the last 50 years under neoliberal ideology: Half of all fossil fuels were burned after the last episode of Seinfeld, and the book makes it crystal clear that the consequences will be dire for everyone, but mostly for those who're already exploited and historically oppressed in the global south. My climate change thinking for a long time now goes along the lines that after 2030/40ish, that the unforeseen (and foreseen) consequences of atmospheric and environmental pollution will be so dire, there will be no other topic of relevance. This book confirms this view a good deal.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - Crooked River (dt. Ocean - Insel des Grauens) ★★ Likely my first and last Pendergast novel as i don't like Pendergast very much. I have a soft spot for the objectively not-so-good 90s monster-thriller The Relic, the movie adaption of the first book in the series, but never bothered to read any of it, and now i did. I don't like the pretentious "gentleman-intellectual quirky detective who is also superman and good with guns and fighting and speaks in latin sometimes and is funny too and who's also Sherlock Holmes and he's reckless and sticks it to the man" schtick of this, and i don't like the supposedly mysterious female sidekick with violet eyes who is also Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell but also vulnerable and who is also an all-competent assassin and so forth. The pulpy action at the ending is entertaining, but doesn't go well with those characters for me, and it doesn't mix with the pretty standard detective procedure novel that makes up a large parts of the book. On top of that, the german title and blurb suggest some monster from the deep sea thriller which this is decidedly not. As this is one of the newer novels in this long running series, i might give Pendergast another try from one of his first adventures, but not anytime soon.

Anthony Ryan - Red River Seven (dt. Ein Fluss so rot und schwarz) ★★ I was in the mood for some postapocalyptic pulp and this so-so delivered but not in a very good way. People on a boat wake up with amnesia and they have to figure out who they are and why they are there, they find some phone and some voice tells them what to do. Turns out, they got their memories whiped out, traveling along River Thames through a London full of plant-mutant-monsters, and remembering things triggers the mutation. The book is full of weirdly bad written moments, for instance, when one of them mutates because she remembered some stuff, but not her name, she also claims that she hated her name anyways, which is weird when you don't know your name. The book makes this kind of stuff constantly. It's a somewhat entertaining novel, an amalgam of 28 Days Later and The Girl with all the gifts, but plotholes and inconsistent logic turned me off, besides the clichéd plot and characters.

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (dt. Generation Angst) ★★★ I wrote a lengthy review of Haidts book and the gist was that "I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle."

Lee Child - Persuader (Reacher #4) (dt. Der Janusmann) ★★★ The 12th Reacher i've read, Persuader will be the source material for the upcoming third season of the (quite good) series adaption. Reacher is working unofficially with the DEA to infiltrate a criminal operation by staging the kidnapping and rescue of the son of a gangster. Reacher becomes a trusted bodyguard, while trying to get a stab at a guy who ten years ago brutally murdered Reacher's colleague. All Reacher ingredients are there, it's suspenseful and sometimes clever, and i just like the character and his stoic approach to everything. It's just that Childs simple prose just can't elevate the material to something more than "clever pulp". Which is just fine.

Lee Child - 61 Hours (Reacher #14) (dt. 61 Stunden) ★★★ The 13th Reacher for me, and another good one: After a bus accident, Reacher strands in freezing South Dakota, where the witness of a crime is threatened by corrupt cops and gangster bosses closing in on an epic meth deal for the ages. Another good Reacher that, while being rather low on high octane action, is well put together with some fresh stylistic manorisms of Child, but comes with a botched ending. Spoilers now, i guess. Look, dude, you just can't show your hero trying to escape an imminent giant kerosine fireball of epic proportions and then simply fade away. We all know he made it, Child wrote more Reacher-novels after all. But this is like that music joke where someone plays a piece of music except for the final note and then can't sleep until he hits that note on the piano, completing the unfinished composition -- and this is an unfinished novel. It's a noob mistake, and a stupid one at that. I still enjoyed the book, but come on.

Werner Herzog - Die Zukunft der Wahrheit (eng. The Future of Truth) ★★★ A short meandering essay about the state of truth, which we can't know or perceive anyway. Herzog tells anecdotes and poetic historical vignettes, draws a rough sketch of what he terms "extatic truth", in which art and epistemology come together to make you feel or experience truth instead of perceiving it. Unfortunately, it stays a bit shallow and doesn't dive deep into its subject, which ofcourse is owed to the short form of only 107 pages. It's ideosyncratic, weird and quirky, just as you'd expect from Herzog, but it also stays a bit underwhelming compared to the oevre of its author, and the bits about tech, AI and deepfakes are not very well researched, if you know the topic.

Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation (dt. Mein Jahr der Ruhe und Entspannung) ★★★ If you want to read a well written novel about an annoying, rich, entitled, depressed, young woman, this is your book. I liked the prose, but expected some more meditations on, well, meditation and introspection. Instead, we get a woman hoarding pills and psychopharmaca, constantly complaining about everything and everybody, except her looks, and an ending you can see coming from a mile away. Still, i liked the prose and somewhat connected to the entitled little prick, so, job done, but not much more.

Peter Sloterdijk - Die Reue des Prometheus: Von der Gabe des Feuers zur globalen Brandstiftung (eng. The regrett of Prometheus: From the gift of Fire to global Pyromania) ★★★★ German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk lays down a theory of climate change, based on marxist materialism, going from the prehistoric discovery of fire to its many applications in combination with exploitative forms of labor (slavery, industrialization), ultimately demanding an "energetic pacifism" and the formation of a global "firefighter brigade". I'm sucking up some theoretical and philosophical takes on climate change at the moment, and Sloterdijks entry to the "genre" is a good and sometimes great contribution in a field that is just starting to take shape, from fictional visions in solarpunk-novels to theoretical approaches like particle-based economics of materialist transformation and the terrestrialism of Bruno Latour. As i said above about Peter Frankopans climatic world history: I expect this stuff to be the only topic of relevance within a few decades, simply because we must.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Chain-Gang All-Stars ★★★ I'm a sucker for those old 70s italian postapocalyptic future gladiator movies full of deadly gladiator fights between inmates in the future and great, i thought, and bought this blind, expecting, well, some good scifi action with some critical undertones about the US-prison system. But while we do get all this, the book is also full of flat characters who all talk the same and act the same, it's basically just people talking and gladiator fights, and all of this in a pretentious prose that wants to tell its minimal plot with epic pathos, using even biblical language. It's like a Madmax ripoff but all characters talk like playing shakespear, but because ofcourse it wants to be "badass" they also say "fuck" all the time. This makes it sounds worse than it is and the action is entertaining (but not great), but the social critique stays shallow and the prose comes around as sometimes cool, sometimes annoying. Meh, as they say.

Aleida Assmann - Im Dickicht der Zeichen (eng. Semiotic Thickets) ★★★★★ Aleida Assmann is a reknowned cultural scholar best known for her work on semiotics and cultural memory together with her late husband Jan Assmann (about whom i wrote recently in Cultural Memory in the Digital). In Im Dickicht der Zeichen (which translate to something like Semiotic Thickets), she collects some essays into one book about various forms of "natural semiotics", that is: Reading and seeing symbols within nature, and the historical transformations of epistemology, of what we know, how we know it, and where we get it from. It goes into basic semiotics, structures of signage, hieroglyphs and their various interpretations throughout philosophical history and more esoteric examples like silent movies. The book, while being very demanding and deep, is not a very complicated read and stays accessible for a non-academic like me, which is something i admire in academic writers. If you're into symbols and signs, typography and epistemology and you're interested in theoretical takes, the whole body of work from this scholar-couple is highly recommended, and this book is no exception.

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein ★★★★★ I finally read the orginal Frank, and it was just as great as i expected it to be. Most interesting to me as a huge fan of the old Universal Monster Movies and the original Frankenstein and Frankensteins Bride were the differences ofcourse, of which there are plenty. After reading the novel it becomes clear just how much the screenwriters added, changed and shuffled the original material, sometimes making an improvement while adapting it for the screen -- the famous scene where the monster throws the girl in a lake is not in the book, where we get the murder of a boy leading to a court scene with very different dynamics and outcomes. The book puts more emphasis on entangled fate which neither creator or creation can escape, and the consequences of guilt for everyone involved. I loved the prose and structure, the composition of a retold story which is sandwiched by chasing scenes in the arctic, and it's ambivalent message about scientific progress stays timely. It's exactly the great classic i expected, and everybody should read Frankenstein at least once.

Salman Rushdie - Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (dt. Knife: Gedanken nach einem Mordversuch) ★★★★★ When Rushdie was attacked two years ago, it shocked and surprised me a good deal. I never read Satanic Verses and while i tried to read other Rushdies, i can't really get into his ornamental, colorful, fractured prose, which is okay. But i just like the guy, having seen plenty of him on talkshows like Bill Maher, and he's just a great, cool, sympathetic figure to me. Then there comes an asshole, accordingly named "asshole" in the book, and puts a knife in his eye and the book is Rushdies way of dealing with that. He does that with a ton of humor, but also with unforgiving sharpness, analyzing the islamofascist wannabe-murderer as the humorless unfucked prick that he is, and not wasting too much time on the guy because, after all, he's just not that interesting. Instead, Rushdie tells us a lot about his late life love for his wife, how they met and how his family and friends all dealt with the situation, how he healed and thankfully, humourously, simultaneously does and doesn't spare us from some of the more painfully embarassing medical procedures. It's a historical literary document, a tragic story of hardship, and also the diary of a funny guy full of life, and that's all such a book can achive. I have nothing but Respect for Salman Rushdie.

Don Winslow - City in Ruins (Danny Ryan #3) ★★★★★ I friggin love Winslows Danny Ryan-saga, with this last entry bringing this gangster epic to a more than satisfying conclusion. I already loved the first two books, and this one just brings it home. I love his prose, that is both barebones and detailed, his realistic dialogue that makes character come to life, and his kickass style of composing action in a highly suspenseful cross-cutting technique. I love Winslows intuitive sense for suspense and revealing moments, and how he manages to draw characters you care about, even the smallest, not at all important minor guy. I love how much of Winslows action stays implicit, with final sentences of chapters creating whole Scorsese-movies in your head, of splosions and gangsters and heroes killing each other in the night. I already have two more Winslow-novels on my stack (The Winter of Frankie Machine and The Power of the Dog) and i can't wait to read them. This is fantastic Thriller-entertainment at it's finest and the literary equivalent of Martin Scorsese.

Heinz Paetzold - Ernst Cassirer zur Einführung (eng. Introduction to the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer) ★★★ I wanted an accessible non-academic book about Ernst Cassirer and his philosophy of the symbolic form, and the blurb says this is an accessible introduction to that, and i got a short but inaccessible book full of academic jargon that demands a whole set of pre-study, and which never explains its presumptions. It's useful, and if you put in the work and follow the mentioned literature, i bet you can get a good overview of Cassirers thinking out of this, but this is not the book with which i was able to do that.

UPGRADE

A new paper by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has calculated the economic damages due to global warming by the year 2050, which are already "locked in" by current emission targets. These damages are certain to affect societies worldwide in the next 26 years.

The total amounts to 19% of the global economy, or 38 trillion US dollars. That is the number 38 followed by 12 zeros, or 38 thousand billions, or 38 million millions. In a monospaced sans serif font set in bold, the number looks like this:

That’s a very big number. For comparison, the complete economy of the US in the year 2023 was worth $27.36 trillion dollars, that’s roughly 10 trillion bucks less than the economic damages locked in for the next 26 years. Locked in, dare i say, by the supposedly fiscal conservative parties and their followers.

The calculations and results in the paper are considered conservative and they primarily include damages from warming, increased rainfall, and temperature fluctuations, while extreme weather events like storms or wildfires are harder to statistically model. The calculations also account for adaptations to extreme weather by countries and companies, noting that poorer nations will have less capacity for such adaptations. Africa and South Asia are the most affected regions in terms of projected value destruction, but the effects will be global, impacting the economic output of all countries. This means, we are facing a long-term, climate-change-induced recession of the entire world economy.

According to the study, the projected damages already exceed the investments needed to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C, as stipulated by the (non-legally binding) Paris Agreement. The projected damages increase by another 50% when "further climatic components" are included.

Another recent paper found that economic damages from climate change to be “six times worse than thought”, which, i’m sure, will be a sweet nightmare lullaby to any insurance company exec. This is the world we are leaving to our children — social upheavals and political conflicts not accounted for.

Ten years ago, a study found that the externalized costs of all industrial sectors amounted to a staggering 7.3 trillion dollars per year — a 7 followed by 12 zeros —and that none of the sectors would be profitable if these costs from greenhouse gas emissions or water, air, and land pollution were included.

Meanwhile, the same forces that knowingly drive the entire world (not just economically) to the brink are engaging in disinformation campaigns to prevent even the most necessary adaptation initiatives and who, in concerted efforts, continue to criminalize climate activism and drag kids to court who dare to speak up.

A few days ago, a Berlin prosecutor filed charges against activists from the Last Generation, including on suspicion of "forming a criminal organization". In doing so, the public prosecutor's office is not only becoming a mouthpiece for the conservative think tank network Atlas, which specifically lobbies against inconvenient climate policies and has influenced politicians for years, including Bundestag member Frank Schäffler from the economic liberal FDP-party. Besides his role in the Bundestag, Schäffler is also the Managing Director of the Prometheus think tank, which is part of said Atlas Network. Schäffler was one of the most prominent conservative voices who, at the start of the Last Generation protests, spoke of them in terms of "terrorism" and "criminal organization", language that was eagerly picked up and established by conservative media outlets like Springers newspaper Welt and the Bild tabloid.

This choice of words by so-called representatives of the people and conservative media, it should be noted, is directed at a protest organization explicitly dedicated to climate protection, which was elevated to constitutional status in 2021 by a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court. The Berlin prosecutor's office has now allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for conservative think tanks and mass-media-propagated memes of right-wing politicians to criminalize young people organizing resistance against policies that violate fundamental civil rights, legitimized by the Constitutional Court. So far, so bad.

In a commentary on the 75th anniversary of the german constitution, the largest public broadcast service ARD now reflects on the idea of a fundamental right to climate protection and whether granting rights for subjects of nature (such as rivers, forests, animals, and even the atmosphere) in the constitution would be helpful.

I am unsure if new legal entities for nature are helpful for climate protection. Skeptical voices in the article rightly point out that natural entities cannot assert or claim their rights; human administrators would always be needed to manage these rights. I also think that the "intergenerational justice" emphasized by the german constitutional court is entirely sufficient to ensure the protection of natural entities within the framework of existing boundaries and limits. According to the 2021 decision, climate protection is justiciable and part of fundamental rights protection, and that is that.

Nevertheless, according to lawyer Roda Verheyen, who won the climate ruling at the highest constitutional court, this jurisprudence has "not yet arrived in the decision-making reality of german courts", even though "the constitutional mandate for climate protection requires and presupposes radical transformations".

I am very confident that the Berlin prosecutor's office had more in mind the outraged Frank Schäffler and his tweets suggested by the Atlas Network, rather than the climate ruling of the constitutional court and the resulting ecological fundamental rights, when filing charges.

In light of the increasing criminalization of young people who engage in civil disobedience to fight for the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutional court and who are insulted and spat upon by people memed by right-wing think tanks, I have a simple question to the Berlin prosecutor's office:

Who’s gonna pay those 38.000.000.000.000 dollars in economic loss — a very big number with 12 zeros —, and the damages done to criminalized kids who are holding up the constitution, and where can we file them?

UPGRADE

Last week, OpenAI presented the latest update of ChatGPT: the chatbot can now "speak" and "converse" with users in various voices, complete with "human" filler words ("um", "uh", etc.), pauses, simulated breathing, laughter, and giggles. This new version of the chatbot sounded exactly like Scarlett Johansson, who voiced an AI about 10 years ago for Spike Jonze's film "Her," a melancholic character study about the consequences of emotional attachments to AI systems. During the presentation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a single word: "Her."

Today, Scarlett Johansson released a statement announcing legal action, and OpenAI subsequently removed the "Sky" voice option from ChatGPT. It’s all a misunderstanding and that the resemblance to Scarlett Johansson's voice was unintentional. Sure thing. As Johansson's statement reveals, OpenAI and the actress had been in negotiations for months, and just two days before the presentation, Altman tried to persuade the actress to lend her voice to his "Her" version. Johansson refused, and OpenAI still used a voice that was extremely similar to hers.

OpenAI using the voice of maybe the most famous actress in the world who also portraied the voice of an AI in a (misunderstood) movie about AI is not a coincidence.

In a recent piece at Aeon, Bryan Norton wrote about the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, who differentiated the terms "technics" and "technology" to show how our fascination with the surface of technology — the shiny gadgets, the colorful interfaces, the sleek designs, and today: the seductive synthesized voices of famous actresses — obscures our actual relationship to the tools and their true impact on us as humans in a societal social fabric.

Stiegler developed the concept of "pharmacology", according to which new media technologies affect us similarly to pharmaceuticals, potentially having both beneficial and harmful effects. Stiegler's notion of technics points to these "pharmaceutical" effects of technology: the "side effects" that lie beneath the surface of interfaces and mere application results.

Sam Altman gave the latest version of ChatGPT the voice of a famous actress with the explicit goal of realizing the fictional chatbot from Spike Jonze's film. The question now is, in Stiegler's terms, what "pharmacological" effects lurk behind this Scarlett Johansson interface. Two things come to mind.

Firstly, a recent study confirmed the psychoactive effect of AI chatbots: an experiment with over 2000 conspiracy theory believers showed that a conversation with a chatbot could reduce their beliefs by about 20%. This sounds great first, but it essentially means that, yes, indeed: a chatbot can influence people to change fundamental attitudes. AI systems are actually persuasive apparently — and using the familiar voice of Scarlett Johansson creates a direct connection between the auditory, now also Hollywood-glamorous interface surface of ChatGPT technology, and the seductive power of the speech-simulating technics beneath.

(This is why I signed the open moratorium letter a year ago: I don’t care much about alleged AI doomsday scenarios. But the seductive power of mimetic and anthropomorphic AI systems, which suggest that there’s “personality” behind simulated language, and the unpredictable psychological consequences if these "personalities" lead to a synthetic theory of mind, where AI systems occupy a real and effective place as "social actors" in our minds — this worries me more than any robotic paperclip-juggling AI. Another similar example would be the psychoactive effect of romantic chatbots, which fulfill all our desires on command, potentially creating unpredictable and unfulfillable expectations in real human relationships.)

By (non-consensually) using the voices of famous actresses and making them emphatically "human" (with filler words and ohs and ahs and giggles), OpenAI is deliberately trying to get "under the skin" of its users (to quote the title of another film starring Scarlett Johansson). With this AI-mimetic seduction tactic, OpenAI obscures both the psychoactive effect of its product and the fact that we pay dearly for this synthetic seduction-by-chatbot in the form of gigantic carbon footprints and a water consumption from data centers that increased by 30% for Microsoft in 2022 alone.

These are just some of the possible and actual effects of ChatGPT's technics, which OpenAI's techno-mimetic masks are already obscuring today. More will follow.

UPGRADE

Silvia Ferrara - Der Sprung: Eine Reise zu den Anfängen des Denkens in der Steinzeit (eng. The Jump: A trip to the beginnings of thinking in the stone age) ★★
Ferrara tries to answer the question, why early humans painted cave walls 50000 years ago, and she tries to do that by analyzing the paintings themselves. An art analytical take on an unanswerable question, and theories are legion, just as the likely correct answers (some where painted as ritualistic shamanic stuff, others for fun, others as an exercise, others as a hunting plan, mnemonic devices, accounting, teaching tools, etc etc, and all of those crossing over each other for thousands and thousands of years). To answer the why-question from an art analytical perspective is not an easy endeavour, and while this is an interesting book in itself (i'm a sucker for cave paintings, anthropology, and the history of writing systems), i think she largely fails due to her oftentimes confusing writing style that, in lack of a scientific proven explanation of something, falls back into an ornamental style that wants to put emphasis on the mystery of cave paintings. She's more occupied writing about her whizzy crazy associations and some random memories with cave art than writing a good, structured book on the history of the topic. This may work for some, but not for me. I still learned some nice details though, but not enough to give this more than 2 stars.

Lee Child - Im Visier (Reacher 19: Personal) ★★★ / Keine Kompromisse (Reacher 20: Make Me) ★★★ / Der Bluthund (Reacher 22: The Midgnight Line) ★★
On my quest to read all Reacher-novels, i'm now at 11 of 25, and these three are, while entertaining, not among the best in the series. All of these are recent novels, and i miss some of the qualities of the older ones -- the sparse prose, the ultra-detailed action sequences, Reachers wit and cleverness. These are still entertaining thriller novels, but they lack a bit of the punch of the first ones.

Jack Finney - Die Körperfresser kommen (eng. Invasion of the Body Snatchers) ★★★
I love all the Bodysnatchers-adaptions (except the Nicole Kidman-stinker from 2006 or so) and i rewatched all of them recently, when i figured: You know what, why not read the novel? So i did, all the elements are there, and the blankness, emptyness, bare of any identity markers of those not-dead-because-never-alive body grown out of alien seeds keep on being a nice universal meta-metaphor for any societal alienation, even in a dated scifi novel from the 50s. Bodysnatchers when it was written was a metaphor for the red scare, about "neighbors turning into communists", in the seventies, it was a metaphor for the sexual revolution, where "kids turned into weird excessive sexmaniacs", in the 90s Ferrara tried to turn it into a metaphor for american military culture, and in the 00s it was turned into a metaphor for post 9/11 paranoia. It's a universal story about paranoia in the face of rampant alienation, where our friends and neighbors suddenly turn into something else. Which beggs the question: Where is the social media-era version of the story? Where's the NPC-Bodysnatchers, or the Deepfake Bodysnatchers? Especially the NPC-meme basically is the very same story: Everybody is a non playing character, an empty hull of a human, parrotting empty phrases, except me and my peers, we are real humans. The digital age is a deeply paranoid age, and all the users might be alien plants in the heads of some conspirational 4chan anons. It's a story of our age, and a new interpretation is begging to be written.

Don Winslow - City on Fire / City of Dreams (Danny Ryan #1&2) ★★★★
I wanted to read other thrillers than Reacher and boy did Winslow get me hooked. It's the story of italian and irish mobs going to war in Providence, Rhode Island, and while the story itself is not very surprising, it's Winslows style that just sucks you in. I paced through City on Fire, which so much reminded me of Martin Scorseses Goodfellas, that i constantly read it in the narrating voice of Joe Pesci. You know you read a good thriller when you have the voice of effing Joe Pesci in your head.

Herfried Münkler - Welt in Aufruhr: Die Ordnung der Mächte im 21. Jahrhundert (eng. World in Turmoil: World Orders in the 21st Century) ★★★★
Herfried Münkler is a world reknowned political scientist at the Berlin Humboldt University, and in this book, he describes how the old dynamic of the cold war with 2 global main actors made place to a more chaotic world (in which we live now) that slowly evolves, according to Münkler, to a pentarchy of five global powers (US, EU, China, Russia and India) which in the coming decades, under certain circumstances, may lead to a new stable configuration of global powers providing a stable model for world peace. If you're, like me, not overly interested in politics, but still want to know how the larger picture is evolving internationally, this a good book to read about geopolitics in the 21st century.

Naomi Alderman - The Future ★★★
I friggin loved Aldermans The Gift, so picking this up was a nobrainer, and i was somewhat disappointed. The Future is a book about a billionaire class building bunkers while the world goes to shit, with some rebels planning to get rid of them in a pretty original way. The book itself is shattered into a million bits: climate, ai, internet outrage and socmed, pandemics, hong kong riots, preppers and survivalism, religious cults, anarcho capitalism and accelerationism, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, all told in nonchronological vignettes, mostly from the perspective of the protagonist. A collage of the titular future made with thousands of bits from the present. What sounds pretty cool is a bit dumbed down by the simplistic ending, which is still pretty entertaining as a microstory in the style of Lord of the Rings with mech suits on an abandoned island. An entertaining novel let down by an ending that was too simplistic and naive for my taste.

Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock ★★★
A thousand page doorstopper by Neal "Metaverse" Stephenson about the climate crisis, a slow meandering wide ranging novel showing a detailed panoramic view of a world circa 2040ish, in which heatwaves caused by climate change are rampant and a billionaire decides to just fire sulfur into the sky with a giant cannon to geoengineer our atmosphere. I loved how Stephenson incorporates as diverse topics as climate change, modern aristocracy, indian martial arts and political conflict into one coherent storyline -- but i also found it somewhat pointless. Stephenson has surprising little to say about a climate change that is largely induced by economic ideologies, and simply turns dealing with the consequences into an entertaining scifi thriller. It's a good read, and i love many of the details like the indian-chinese stick-fights at the border that clearly was inspired by this Youtube-clip, but i missed some larger message about the mallaise we're in. But maybe the point is: Billionaires gonna do whatever they want, they'll sound like Jurassic Parks John Hammond while doing it and there's not much we can do about it. Which is a bit underwhelming.

Friederike Otto - Klimaungerechtigkeit: Was die Klimakatastrophe mit Kapitalismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu tun hat (eng. Climate Injustice: What the climate crisis has to do with capitalism, racism and sexism) ★★★★
Friederike Otto is one of Time Magazines 100 most influential people in 2021 and a leading climate researcher who contributed to attribution science, that is: The science of finding out, how much of a hurricane, flooding or heatwave can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. I picked this up because i am one of those guys who, while seeing that climate does indeed lead to injustices, i do think that justice issues take a second row to what is largely a physics based planetary issue, which needs tons of international regulations and engineering. However, I find myself convinced by her arguments. A better title for the book would have been "Climate Adaption Injustice", because that's what it's about: How humanity adapts to climate change and the (historical) injustices leading to adaptive disadvantages in the global south. It is clear to me that dire consequences of climate change are already locked in — economic, ecological, not to speak of the disruptions caused by migration and international conflict --, and if that's clear we need a clear analysis of the status quo, to figure how to deal with those consequences in a fair way on a global level. Friederike Ottos short book provides that analysis.

Anders Levermann - Die Faltung der Welt (eng. Folding the World) ★★★
Anders Levermann is a researcher of complex systems at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Research and his book wants to provide an alternate narrative for green growth and decoupling of emissions from economic growth. Basically it's about "horizontal growth", while classic economic development would be "vertical growth". He proposes an "inside growth", that goes into diversifying products and recycling, not the extractive "bigger, bolder, higher". I pretty much agree with him on most of his points, but all of this is not very new -- he simply uses mathematics as a metaphor for regulation and writes about how the paradigm of "endless growth" can exist in a limited system.

Max Barry - Die 22 Tode der Madison May (eng. The 22 Murders of Madison May) ★
Scifi-novel about a guy hopping parallel universes to find the perfect version of an aspiring actress, only to find subpar Madison Mays and killing them. What sounds intriguing comes around as weirdly phrased (the book is somehow full of eggs) and reads like a sitcom sometimes. It features clichéd and flat characters, boring twists, shallow dialogue without any depth, it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller, not scifi enough to be scifi, its a boring Jennifer Aniston movie with clichéd genre elements, and the more interesting parts (a mysterious organization of people traveling through parallel universes and using "anchors", objects like a lock of hair, to make sure some stuff and people exist in the target universe) stay largely unexplored. Waste of time.

Samuel W. Gailey - Die Schuld (eng. The Guilt We Carry) ★★★
A young woman who finds her dead stripclub-owner boss dead in her bed and a bag full of dollars. Ofcourse, she takes the money and runs. During her escape, she examines her past and her own guilt, and learns to deal with the consequences. A good little pulp crime novel that could've been more, but stays within the trodden path of it's story, which isn't a bad thing at all.

Liu Cixin - Die Drei Sonnen (eng. The Three-Body Problem) ★★★★
I read this three weeks before the Netflix-series came out (which i still haven't seen) because i wanted to know what the fuzz is about. It's a good book, maybe great sometimes, and i loved some of the more bonkers ideas about how life may exist on a planet in an unstable orbit in a three star system, and The parts about the cultural revolution and it's implications were daring and damn interesting, but i expected a bit more from it, given the hype. However, the second book already sits on my bookshelf, and i'll read all parts.

UPGRADE

In 2015, Climate Inside News broke a blockbuster scoop: Exxon had not only been aware of the consequences of burning fossil fuels since the 1970s through its own research, but, according to new findings, had also developed its own climate models and analyses so precise that they could predict trends in global warming that remain valid to this day (around 0.2°C per decade).

In the subsequent court hearing of a lawsuit brought by the City of New York, Exxon was (unfortunately) acquitted of the accusation of defrauding its investors. Whether Exxon deceived humanity itself has not (yet) been litigated.

Recently, Exxon CEO Darren Woods embarrassed himself and his corporation when he claimed that the public — that's us — is to blame for the slow progress of the green energy transition because we are not willing to pay for it. Mind you, for an energy transition that would have been significantly cheaper in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when we had enough time to transition the economic system into a sustainable one.

I recount this brief episode of the climate-related business conduct of one of the world's largest oil corporations as a small intro, because as always in climate-related economic-political matters, it's much worse.

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UPGRADE

Dario Kenner from University of Essex examined public statements from the American Petroleum Institute and FuelsEurope, two of the largest lobbying organizations in the oil industry in the USA and Europe, and found that they have been systematically opposing green, low-carbon technologies since the 1960s. Kenner found dozens of cases where lobbyists exerted pressure and influence on politics to prevent subsidies for things like electric cars, solar panels, or heat pumps.

All of this was happening 60 years ago under the banner of a supposed "technology-neutral approach" by the dominant energy companies, using the same false arguments of alleged distortion of competition through state subsidies for renewable energies as today, all while - and here it gets particularly egregious - benefiting itself from subsidies and tax breaks. According to the International Monetary Fund, subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, including societal costs, amounted to a whopping $760 billion in the USA and $310 billion in the EU for the year 2022 alone.

And to keep the sweet tax money rushing in — money that, mind you, comes from the same people Exxons CEO dares to accuse of slowing down climate action —, the oil industry switched tactics, going from hiding their evidence and climate change denial, to greenwashing and outright “deception, disinformation and double speak”, as a new report from the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee (the largest investigative committee in the House of Representatives) put it.

The report accuses big oil of nothing less than a "misinformation campaign". Specifically, the filed documents reveal that (emphasis in cursive mine):

• Publicly, the oil industry promoted natural gas as a climate-friendly, green energy source, while internally the companies were well aware of the scientific evidence indicating that natural gas is as climate-damaging as coal, and that natural gas is just as incompatible with politically set emission reduction goals.

• Internally, they referred to the targets of the Paris Agreement as "unattainable goals and incompatible with business plans."

• The oil industry lobbied against climate laws while publicly pledging their support.

• Publicly, they advocated for Carbon Capture, while internally discussing that Carbon Capture at the necessary scale is not profitable enough, measured against a "free-to-pollute business model."

• They deliberately used trade associations, think tanks, and NGOs to spread misleading narratives and employ tactics they themselves did not want to be associated with. (Half a year ago, reporting showed how the Atlas Network, a network of think tanks funded by the Koch Brothers, apparently influenced german FDP member Frank Schäffler, who repeatedly referred to climate activists of the Last Generation as "terrorists" and a "criminal organization," which surely was not insignificant for the decision to conduct nationwide raids on kids. The police spoke at the time of "investigations on suspicion of forming a criminal organization." I can understand why the oil companies do not want to be associated with such potentially dangerous deceptions of the police.)

• The oil industry forms partnerships with science and research to specifically finance studies that align with their business plans, while simultaneously tracking and monitoring critical voices and activists. For example, Shell discussed in internal emails "embedding" staff-scientists at the University of Berkeley, and representatives of British Petroleum spoke about marginalizing critical scientists.

• All six companies and organizations under investigation obstructed and delayed the House committee's investigation, did not cooperate, and did not provide more than 4,000 requested documents despite legal requirements.

At the global UN climate conference in 2021, 503 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry participated. The next year, it was 636. A year later, the number of lobbyists applying the strategy of "deception, disinformation, and double-talk" outlined in the report to the democratically elected representatives of the global public at the most important meeting for coordinating and negotiating "Climate Action" surged to a staggering 2,456. The number of oil industry lobbyists exceeded the number of all other country delegations, except for Brazil and the host country, the United Arab Emirates.

The report from the investigative committee is another damning proof that representatives of the oil industry have no place at the negotiation table at the COPs, where a lot of people in suits decide over the environmental future of the planet and the survival of millions of people in the not-so-distant future. And while climate change is starting to affect everything and the deceiving behavior of the energy sector is coming to light, this is what happens: from the business side: lies; from politics: too little; otherwise: police violence against climate activists. The word for this more-than-half-a-century-long deception of the public by politics and the oil industry is: hypocrisy.

During the hearing of the experts and authors of the report, Bernie Sanders remarked: "I think it's time to call on the people who caused this problem and knowingly spread lies about it to pay the bill."

He's right: Make them pay.

UPGRADE

I just finnished Jonathan Haidts The Anxious Generation and to properly review it and explain, why this is also a somewhat personal book to me, i have to explain were i'm coming from. This is gonna be a long one, and if you want a short gist and move on: I think Haidt's book is a timely call to action, i largely agree with his analysis, but wish it was more in depth and i think he misses a big piece of the puzzle. It is this missing piece i mostly write about here.

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UPGRADE

Shine the headlight, straight into my eye
Like the roadkill, I'm paralysed
(Placebo, Teenage Angst)

It was around 2012 when i noticed that things were off. By then, i already gained some extensive insights on virality. I'm online since the mid 90s, and contributing to the web since i started my own blog in 2005, which became a german mainstay for webculture soon. In 2008, i had a first "viral hit", with a simple phrase lifted from a political poster, which became a national sensation and inspired dozens of flashmobs disrupting political events during the election year, so much so that at one point, Angela Merkel had to adress to "young people in the back to shut up". It inspired songs and books and I went on national TV (you can see my 15 years younger self in this clip at 1:50) to explain what is happening. That was a time when politicians barely could spell the word "browser" and we were baffled and blown away by the outcomes of spontaneous online movements. Years later the fine folks at 4chan invented the word "Meme Magic" to describe such things, when things going viral "transcend the realm of cyberspace and result in real life consequences".

With the beginning of the 2010s and social media finally making it's mainstream breakthrough, things started to change. By then, Buzzfeed established a new publishing practice: Serving all kinds of identities with cheap fast fluff and listicles — a factory for identities —, and combining that with only vague, non-informative headlines: Clickbait was born, and perfected in the years that followed by media outlets like Upworthy. The ur-mainstream-viralbomb Kony 2012 showed that you can direct whole masses of digitally networked people with emotionalizing, simplistic, semi-political content that outrages them, with a big portion of those people being young adults and teens.

Virality on early Social Media had reached a tipping point, where people on social media increasingly selected for emotionality and outrage, and it became clear to me that this new media environment of personalized writing and blogging, "citizen journalism" and social media held more manipulative power than anything we've seen before. I became interested in virality itself, memetics, the dynamics of swarm behavior, and wrote about the psychological underpinnings of webculture ever since.

Then, the abomination of Gamergate blew up the internet and created the culture wars, 4chan supposedly "memed Trump into the White House", and thousands of webculture experts, including me, were scratching their heads and wrote thinkpiece after thinkpiece about what the hell is going on — all while the mental health of kids deteriorated.

Jonathan Haidts book, like the title and its byline "How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness" suggest, revolves around the effects that these developments — the social media revolution in tandem with helicopter parenting focussing on safety —, had on the psychology specifically of kids. It's the first of a Haidt-socmed-doublewhammy, with the next book coming out next year revolving around the psychological effects of social media on democracy and institutions. (To be fair: That one will be much closer to my interests, but these developments have overlaps and common causes, to which we'll get in a second.)

The book is split in two parts, with the first chapters describing what is happening and laying down the evidence with tons of statistics, and a second part revolving around suggestions for solutions to the problem. This first part dives into two arguments: First, the rise of helicopter parenting and "safetyism" in the 80s and 90s took away free play from childhood, then the rise of smartphones and social media sucked the kids into the virtual world, with all those psychological effects of virality and attention economics applying to them. It was then that the numbers of mental health issues for children and adolescents started to rise, especially for girls.

Overall, the book is not so much an in depth look at the psychological and neurological effects of social media, and more of a timely wakeup call to action. I personally gained not that much new insight from it, for which i can't blame the book, simply because i follow the topic very closely for more than 10 years now. I know much of the cited research, and follow the work of Haidt since i blogged about his his brillant The Righteous Mind  back in 2008, and read and wrote a lot about his work in the past. I'm not exactly the targeted audience for this book, but i liked it anyways, even when it was preaching to the choir here. I only wish he went deeper into the neuropsychological workings of social media — because I think he missed a large piece of the puzzle there.

Much of the writings about neuropsychological effects of social media revolve around how endless scrolling and likes and shares create small shots of the gratification-hormone dopamine and how that glues you to the screen. The Anxious Generation mentions related research extensively. And sure enough, this explains a good chunk of what is happening, why you can't just put your phone away, constantly check for notifications and how that makes you addicted.

But dopamine alone can't explain all the conflict we see on social media, and when we talk about the society wide effects of it, we mostly complain about the tribalism, the outrage, the aggressions. This beast is a slot machine of a different kind, and the underlying psychological mechanism is highly relevant for the psyche of kids, too, especially for girls and young women, and it is near completely absent from discourse.

One of the most under-researched topics in social media psychology is how it influences the flow of oxytocin — the so-called "love hormone". Until recently, our understanding of that hormone was that it's largely responsible for social bonding and get's released from interaction with other humans, touching, or when mothers interact with their newborn babies — women have roughly 30% higher oxytocin levels than men. But that's far from the whole story: It is also related to "coordinated outgroup attacks" and even has been found to promote human ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

In an experiment done in 2011, a researcher checked the oxytocin levels of a reporter before and after using Twitter for 10 minutes: They rose by 13% — "as much as a groom at a wedding". When they repeated the experiment with three journalists using Facebook, "they all demonstrated increased levels of oxytocin", with the oxytocin levels of one of the journalists, who was writing with his girlfriends, going up "nearly 150%". This not only means that social media interaction does release oxytocin, but that it creates oxytocin levels in people who know each other at least comparable to those in real life.

Newer research has shown that Oxytocin is not just a hormone for social bonding, but an amplifyier of any important social interaction. Oxytocin is "a social-alert hormone", as one researcher put it, and it is found that even merely "anticipated social contact may result in bursts of oxytocin". Social Media and push notifications create a whole lot of "anticipated social contact", and sure enough: Average teen gets more than 230 notifications on their cell phone each day, study finds.

Arguably, most socmed notifications are not "important social situations", but here's the kicker: You can't know if they are important or not before you check, and if all your peers and friends are on social media platforms, chances are high that these social situations are important. It might be that the highschool prom queen just asked you out on a date, after all! It might also be a friend who tells you about the latest gossip spread about you in the semi-private socmed group "everyone in the class except you". (In the book, Haidt cites one kid who had to endure this especially cruel form of cybermobbing, and i asume this is a common way of cyberbullying among teens at this point.) This would mean that merely the ping from a phone, or even only the anticipation of a ping on the phone, already releases oxytocin. And the closer we are in real life to those pinging us on social media, the higher the oxytocin release -- like the couple mentioned above whose oxytocin release shot up by 150%.

Among the groups on social media who know each other in real life are highschool peers and classmates, and among them, the bullies and their victims. Interestingly, citing from The Anxious Generation: "One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls", and I believe this is related to oxytocin release from social media.

Oxytocin is related to the release of dopamine, too, with a 2015 study finding that "oxytocin appears to impact dopaminergic activity ... which is crucial not only for reward and motivated behavior but also for the expression of affiliative behaviors", meaning that the pleasurable reward we get from likes and comments is intrinsically intertwined with the release of oxytocin, which binds us to the group and increases our tendencies to exclude others, and this is true especially for girls and young women.

If the theory about heightened oxytocin release through social media is right, it hits teenage girls, who spend much more time on social media than boys, in a vulnerable and highly critical phase of their lifes where those hormone levels are beginning to emerge. It binds together the famed "mean girls club" and the winners of the highschool popularity contest even stronger than before, and because oxytocin is also linked to social avoidance in bullied mice — Studies of hormonal flows in mamals commonly apply to human, too —, it increases social anxiety for the loosers of that popularity contest: "after negative social interactions, oxytocin promotes avoidance of unfamiliar social situations." As an amplifyer of social interaction, oxytocin goes both way: It makes the winners feel more loved, and the losers more outcast, and all of this is multiplied by social media.

Haidt spends a whole section on female aggression strategies, how girls violence is relational, social, and goes for the reputation and social bondings of other girls. But only if we take oxytocin into account, we get a full picture of what is happening on social media: Oxytocin binds us to people in our group, and bullying is not just an exclusionary, but in the form of mobbing also a group bonding activity. Thanks to the oxytocin manipulation through social media, the "mean girls club" at highschool is becoming more exclusive, more aggressive, more defensive, all while making being a member of the club highly desirable, because being a member of said club is prestigeous and it's highly visible on social media as they get more likes and shares. Teens compare themselves to those "highschool in-groups" (you know: the cool guys) on a much higher level than before. All while the losers of that oxytocin contest — which are not just the bullied kids, but also those within the "highschool in-group", who are subjected to constant peer pressure to stay in that group —, show higher levels of social anxiety.

In 2011, Scientific American in a piece about these "dark sides" of oxytocin, wrote that "oxytocin should not be used for recreational purposes". Arguably, viral social media activity is one big fat "recreational" oxytocin shot for you, and your peers, and everyone involved in whatever viral thing is doing the rounds in your group. Likely, that thing making the rounds is mockery of someone from the outgroup, and those exclusionary effects do in fact show up in viral statistics: A peer reviewed study from 2021 showed not only that out-group animosity drives engagement on social media, but that "the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language — both established predictors of social media engagement". Mocking members of the outgroup is clearly the highest driver of virality, and even if this study was done in a political context, it should also apply to the social dynamics of kids and teens, especially to mobbing and cyberbullying.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt writes: "Social Media has magnified the reach and effect of relational bullying, placing immense pressure on girls to monitor their words and actions. They are aware that any misstep can swiftly go viral and leave a permanent mark." The highschool popularity contest doesn't stay in school, it sits in your pocket 24/7 and it's with you all. the. time. Bullying in the 80s and 90s was no fun, i can tell you that from personal experience. But in the 2020s, it's a hellish nightmare following you everywhere.

Studies found that "oxytocin is ... involved in maternal aggression and territoriality" and "Psychosocial stress triggers an oxytocin response in women". "Psychosocial stress" here means not only what we commonly understand as workplace related stress, but also information overload, a rising dunbar number from social media connectivity, bloated social circles and the peer pressure to conform. Writing in the New Statesman, Freya India summed it up: "Social media's not just making girls depressed, it's making us bitchy too". Accordingly, in 2019 the New York Times wrote about Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture, and yes, i strongly believe that wokism and identity politics, peer pressure and bullying among girls are at the very least not unconnected, which can explain why the mental health numbers dropped first for liberal girls.

A paper published in January 2023 about a "3-year longitudinal cohort study of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) among sixth- and seventh-grade students recruited from 3 public middle schools in rural North Carolina" found that social media use is linked to brain changes in teens, and that "children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed ... sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time". This heightened "sensitivity to social rewards from peers" sounds a lot like the work of oxytocin to me: As i've written above, oxytocin is a "social alert hormone", and that "even anticipated social interaction may result in bursts of oxytocin". (There are more social media induced changes to children's brains, here's an interview with neurosurgeon Marc Arginteanu talking about these.)

To me, all of this very much looks like that social media is leading to constant heightened oxytocin levels, and it makes us tribalistic, makes us aggressive towards the outgroup and increases tendencies for social exclusion — all of which are rampant on social media, and all of this detoriates the mental health of especially girls and young women on a societal level. I'm not familar with oxytocin research particular in teen girls, but presumably, women develop their already higher oxytocin levels during puberty, because it's the hormone that regulates mother-child-bonding and initiates changes in the birth-canal. If social media is manipulating oxytocin levels, this is a highly potent hormonal change, especially during the puberty of teenage girls.

This may even explain the different outcomes of various studies regarding wellbeing and social media use: as an amplifier of important social interactions, oxytocin makes us feel loved as long as we belong to the in-group, but it makes us socially anxious if we're excluded. Social Media turns the volume of all of this up to 11, and all of these neuropsychological mechanisms are now subject to the incentives created by the attention economy on social media and the design choices of platforms and their gamifications.

In his "philosophy of the symbolic form", Ernst Cassirer describes humans as "the symbolic animal" whose reality consists mostly from communicated language and symbols, an animal that shapes its own meaning by the creation of the symbolic world. To Cassirer, our symbolic world constitutes everything, and it’s only through our symbolic world we can truly understand humans. This makes sense if you look at the rare cases of humans who did not grow up in human groups, but were raised by animals, the so called wild childs. They are barely human at all, have tremendous problems ever integrating into society and can barely learn or speak. This clearly shows how much of our culture is ingrained into human existence itself.

This is especially true for kids, whose childhood is prolonged and extended in comparison to other mamals (who often can walk and sometimes are fully functional right after birth) precicely because they need time to adapt to human culture, or, in other words: to learn. In his book "The Disappearance of Childhood", Neil Postman wrote about how the invention of the printing press extended this learning process even further, and widened the knowledge gap between adults and kids, so they had to go to school for years and learn how to read and write — to learn how to become Cassirers "symbolic animal". It was then that modern conceptions of childhood were invented.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt writes about how kids using social media were increasingly "wandering through adult spaces, consuming adult content, and interacting with adults", and were "engaging in adult activities", such as "managing their online brand". I would add to that: They also got heavily politicized by social media from imitating highly visible and viral social media activity (which favors political outrage), which, for kids, sure must look like a prestigeous behaviour to copy from their adult social media peers.

For some years now, i follow the work of Joshua Citarella, who documents adolescent politcal online subcultures since he first published his e-book Politigram & the Post-left in 2018. His interviewees are mostly kids and adolescents, and some are heavily politically radicalized at ages like 13 years old and younger. These kids engage with fringe political movements like "MAGA Communism", with one of the latest interviews stating that the now 16 year old boy from Texas started to visit online political communities "around 2016", meaning that he was just 8 years old back then.

Cool underground kids talking about stuff like anarcho capitalism, "MAGA communism", and engaging with political communities at the age of 8 sounds very much like "adult activity" to me, and very much like an "end of childhood". It also does not sound very healthy to me. (I also put some weight to these interviews, because these are not formal interviews in a study, but these kids talk freely, without any supervision from adults. And when it comes to kids and what they do i always presume that adults actually know next to nothing about them, which is true for every generation. How much did your parents really know about your ongoings when you were 16?)

For Neil Postman, the end of childhood consisted of a diffusion process involving electronic, visual broadcast media, which made the learning of linear, sequential symbols (reading) obsolete. But these kids sound different: These teens cite philosophers like Karl Marx, Mark Fisher, Gilles Deleuze, Nick Land or Jean Baudrillard. They are highly articulate, super-informed, well read in philosophy and politics — and they are deeply cynical and nihilistic. It's a perspective learned from adults on the internet, fused with the nihilism found on the "cool internet underground" message boards. These kids learned the lessons of social media very well: Copy prestigeous political outrage, dunk on the outgroup, and earn clout and prestige by pushing the fringes.

In "The End of Childhood", Neil Postman quotes Harold Innis’s principle that "new communication technologies not only give us new things to think about, but new things to think with". This new digitally transformed "end of childhood" of our era constitutes to a cultural evolutionary adaption to social media dynamics, where we and our kids, and especially those kids immersing themselves in internet subcultures, adapt to these "new things to think with" in all consequence. I find this deeply worrying, especially if you consider that these "cool kids from the internet underground" are, well, the cool kids, those who score high in the highschool popularity contest and who are imitated by their peers.

For Cassirers "symbolic animal", social media is a giant battlefield for group acceptance, an editing machine with endless possibilities and a playground for the social world, and its unforeseen hormonal effects on the human psyche make it toxic for the whole of childhood, for kids who should not engage in "brand management", or "extremist politics", or DDoS attacks against schools at the age of nine to impress their peers and get their oxytocin shots by virtual pats on the back. Kids should not be subjected to a technology, that, by enhancing and skewing social mechanisms, manipulates their hormone levels.

This is why i agree with Haidts conclusions: Ban phones from school, rise the age for opening social media accounts to 16, end safetyism, and "bring childhood back to earth".

I wish Haidts book would've digged more into some of the effects and dynamics i described here, but the research on social media’s effects on oxytocin levels is sparse (yet), and the workings of oxytocin on social behavior is not very well understood as of now. Much of what i wrote here is speculation and "connecting the dots", coming from an amateur-researcher with some extensive experience in social media virality.

The Anxious Generation mostly revolves about the two major developments in the last 40 years or so, the rise of helicopter parenting and safetyism, and the rise of social media, but it does not go into specific details of what kids are actually doing online very much, and how that contributes. For instance, while Haidt does write about photo-filters on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and how they contribute to self perception and body image, he doesn’t mention phenomena like "Instagram face" or "Snapchat Dysmorphia", which are sometimes so severe that young women seek out plastic surgery.

I also miss some more socio-philosophical takes on why all of this happens, how these psychological effects intertwine and how the informational structure of the web creates a flattened, endless landscape of stuff in which important and unimportant things gain the same weight and create a weird atemoprality, in which narrative structures dissolve, only to spontaneously errupt into an emotionally driven hyperfocus of the swarm, or how conformity on social media flattens culture as a whole, to the effect that diners all over the world look like hipster bars in Brooklyn, simply because this look goes viral on Instagram. Sure, these things don't affect mental health of kids directly, but it is one of the strange outcomes of a digitally networked global culture, and i'd be surprised if it doesn't contribute at all.

However, for what The Anxious Generation wants to be, a call to action, it maybe is the better choice to focus on the very concrete effects directly related to kids' mental health issues, and keep it simple. The arguments laid down in the book are pressing, and even if the better of Haidts’ critics complain about some more shoddy studies in the book, the overall picture of the situation painted in the book is convincing. It is a good, timely book, a wake up call for teachers, decision makers, parents, and last but not least, the kids themselves.

As i laid down above, i was personally involved in making social media and webculture look cool in my country. My former blog had one foot in the internet underground, and my work played a tiny role in making webculture into what it is today. Looking at all the effects this tremendous cultural change had on society and mental health, a part of me regrets that involvement. This is why, at least to some extend, i feel some kind of responsibility, and this is one of the reasons why i wrote about this stuff extensively for more than ten years, and why i am thankful that a world reknowned social psychologist like Jonathan Haidt picked up the topic. I'm very much looking forward to his next book about social media psychology, coming out next year, which will focus on its effects on democracy and institutions.

Social Media and the web are arguably the biggest change in human communication and culture since forever. Some claim it is bigger than the printing press, or even the invention of writing. It is silly to even asume that its effects on our social mechanisms and on our psychology are neglectible, or can be shrugged off, and that everything is just okay.

I'm not as hopeless as this may sound though. I'm very sure we will adapt to these "new things to think with", because that's what humans always do. But the path to that adaption will be a “long and winding road”, to quote a famous teenage favorite of yore, and strange weird things will happen.

Of that, i'm sure.

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Folks, i’m without internet access for the coming days and possibly weeks. I have some more GOOD MUSIC coming up, but besides from that, you’ll have to rely on the usual common medium cooked standard internet instead of the actual really GOOD INTERNET you’re used to. Bummer, i know.

I’m not sure when i can log on again, but you’ll sure hear from me when i do.

Once a month i post the best music i blogged at my other stack at GOOD MUSIC, all the best new tunes and fresh bands from the past month in one place.

We go down the Indie-road with some fine tracks by John Glacier and the wonderful Hinds, get into the Punk waggon with new singles from the Idles and the always balls kicking Lambrini Girls, turn it down a notch for English Teacher and go into some funk-dancable tunes with Portugal. The Man, Rui Gabriel and Alena Spanger.

Then we enter Popland with fantastic glitchy hyperpopian tracks by charlieeeee x piri and Star Boy, go ultimiately very weird with Knower and enter the electronic ether with Oneohtrix Point Never and Squarepusher. Little Simz saves us from all the brainknots and 1999 Write The Future reactivate the legendary Deltron 3030, Bktherula slams some pretty cool and weird raps and Burial has a new epic 13 minute adventure-dub-track.

Kim Gordon takes it from here and Khruangbin steers us into more soulful indie-waters, when Sheer Mag hit us with their best Thin Lizzy-shot from the new album. Fidlar cover Jackson Browne and we’re back with some fine indie rock with Girl and Girl, the epic Young Jesus, some art rock by Drahla, cool alt-rock from Gouge Away and a hypnotic tune from Chaepter, while One True Pairing have an existential crisis it seems.

Paramore are covering the Talking Heads and Psymon Spine keep on dancing when Spaced crash the Aerobic show and bang some heads, with Brat and Gatecreeper contributing some serious Thrash, and the CNTS some finely produced hardcore, while Agriculture play their weird-af mixture of shoegaze and speedmetal.

Then we get soulful with The Black Keys, a the fantastic new songs from Norah Jones, MRCY and Marcus King. Caleb Landry Jones listened to Velvet Undergrounds Perfect Day a lot, The Klittens take it up from here and Ride give us a cool new anthem.

Kate Nash takes us on the final lap, Mk.gee plays the most soulful glitchy newschool pop at the moment, and Bonnie Light Horseman own this months earworm-award for me. Then, Father John Misty makes us dance and good old Billy Joel deepfakes himself into his own past.

Enjoy!

GOOD INTERNET is a reader supported online mag. If you like what i do here, you can support this thing by upgrading your subscription to a paid plan or use one of the other support options you can find at the bottom of this issue.

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My latest piece for german expert platform Piqd, a piece that summarizes latest developments in BCI-technology and extrapolates some possible future scenarios in context of Neuro-Ethics. I translated the thing with ChatGPT and edited for kicks, below the piece in its original german language.

GOOD INTERNET is a reader supported online mag. If you like what i do here, you can support this thing by upgrading your subscription to a paid plan or use one of the other support options you can find at the bottom of this issue.

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Musk recently claimed on his X-formerly-known-as-Twitter that his BCI company, Neuralink has implanted the "first" "chip" in a test subject, who reportedly is doing well post-surgery. In another tweet, Musk claimed the patient successfully "moved a mouse" — referring to maneuvering a cursor on a screen. Musk and Neuralink's stated goal: "Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer." However, there's no evidence supporting Musk's claims, and the newsworthiness of his announcements is close to zilch because:

Putting aside the fact that Musk himself is the sole source of these assertions, these supposed advancements in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology are old news. As noted by renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth in his Guardian article questioning whether we should all be getting chips in our heads, Neuralink is a newcomer to the field, and thought-controlled cursors on screens have been around since the 90s. The actual innovation from Musk's company, an operation robot deploying brain implants, remains shrouded in mystery amid these recent announcements, prompting concerns from neuroscientists.

The reason Elon Musk is working on BCI tech with Neuralink is a nobrainer: the technology, with or without Musk, is advancing rapidly, and an automated implantation machine with BCI and OP robot spells massive profit. In just the past 12 months, neuroscientists, aided by artificial intelligence, have achieved remarkable feats: enabling a paralyzed man to walk again; allowing another paralyzed patient to use their arms and feel with their hands, restoring speech to a woman paralyzed after a stroke at a “brain-to-text rate of 78 words per minute”; reconstructing music from brain activity; and reconstructing images from visual cortex activity. And in previous years, digital "telepathy" has been made possible, aswell as linking the brains of three patients into a network.

Psychologist Gary Lupyan and philosopher Andy Clark have expressed skepticism in an essay on Aeon about direct digital "telepathy," essentially because neural activity is too idiosyncratic and individual to reliably transfer from one person to another. However, they overlook the potential for AI technology to serve as an interpreter between the different neuropatterns of participants. But this (hopefully) is still ways off because, beyond the superficial sci-fi “coolness” of digital "telepathy," there's the question of whether anyone really wants a direct line to other people's thoughts, with all their invasive thoughts and all the neuro-chaos that comes with the package, or how one could technically prevent access to supposedly "Private Thoughts." Maybe I'd rather not know what my neighbor really thinks about me — and vice versa.

Anil Seth also raises the important question in the aforementioned text of whether people will really want to open their skulls to such neuro-antics just to read the chaotic thoughts of their similarly brain-implanted neighbors or to get a few cognitive prostheses. His answer: No. However, an invasive operation might not even be necessary in the future.

In December of last year, researchers at the University of Sydney unveiled a non-invasive brain scanner worn by patients as a simple EEG "cap." While its signal is noisier, the experiment achieved state-of-the-art performance for brain-to-text outputs, albeit with a relatively high error rate. Nonetheless, it's expected that these non-invasive technologies will also make rapid progress, and there are already early hints of their application in future mass markets: last summer, Apple filed a patent for EEG AirPods, in-ear headphones capable of reading electrical signals from the brain. You don't have to be a sci-fi nerd anymore to envision the next generations of Apple's VR/AR glasses with brain interfaces.

All these massive advancements in BCI technology underscore the need for a broad public debate on the ethics of brain interfaces. Already, there are thousands of cases of patients with brain implants left unsupported after a startup's demise, with outdated code and dead batteries in their heads, and Technology Review reports the case of Rita Leggett, a patient with severe epilepsy who was able to lead a nearly normal life thanks to a novel implant that had to be removed after the company went bust — potentially violating her human rights.

In July 2023, UNESCO organized the first conference on neuroethics, calling for a framework for human rights in the context of neurotechnologies and discussing the concept of neuro-rights. Chile became the first country in the world in 2021 to amend its constitution to include explicit rights for neuro-privacy.

Before, the scientific discourse on neuroethics has been ongoing for decades, with the International Neuroethics Society being founded in 2006. The papers "On Neurorights" from 2021 and the paper "Ethical Aspects of BCI Technology: What is the state of the art?" from 2020 provide a good overview of the current state of affairs.

For me as a non-neuroscientist but decades-long-observer of tech, I find these ethical considerations insufficient: AI researchers recently unveiled a computer vision algorithm capable of lip reading, decoding speech from a video signal. What happens in a society where I (not only with a brain implant but also right now with smartphones and their high-resolution super cameras) can eavesdrop on every conversation just by looking at or filming the speakers? Thanks to the rapid progress in BCI technology, it's entirely conceivable that signals from the visual cortex can be translated directly into an AI-enhanced lip-reading superhearing.

For years now, we've been discussing phenomena like peer surveillance, where people use novel technologies to monitor, stalk, and dox others, or where TikTokers broadcast seemingly private gossip-talk from strangers to the outragely and sadomasochistic delight of their audience. Neurotechnology combined with artificial intelligence has the potential to turn entire societies into literal super-recognizers in the coming decades, making such stories seem like harmless preludes. Orwell's "Big Brother" from 1984 may very well morph into "Big Family" where every individual is subjected to surveillance by everyone.

The debates over the security of neurodata from today's BCI pioneers can only mark the beginning of a broad societal discussion about where we draw the lines for the new brain-enhanced AI/BCI cyborgs — prompting Nicholas J. Kelley, Stephanie Sheir, and Timo Istace to write a brief history of neurotechnology on The Conversation and highlight the immense ethical implications.

There’s an old german folk song dating back to the 18th century and the early romantic era, and the age old wisdom contained in it’s lyrics o: "Our thoughts are free, no one can guess them". This might not hold true anymore, very soon.

Elon Musk verkündete jüngst auf X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, seine Firma für Hirn-Computer-Schnittstellen Neuralink habe den "ersten" "Chip" in einem Probanden implantiert und dieser sei nach der Operation wohlauf. In einem weiteren Tweet erklärte Musk, der Patient hätte erfolgreich "eine Maus" bewegt -- damit meinte er einen Cursor auf einem Bildschirm. Musks und Neuralinks erklärtes Ziel: "Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer". Belege für Musks Behauptungen gibt es keine und der Nachrichtenwert dieser muskschen Mitteilungen geht gegen Null, denn:

Völlig davon abgesehen, dass die einzige Quelle für die Behauptungen Musk selbst ist, sind diese angeblichen Fortschritte in Hirn-Computer-Schnittstellen-Technologie (kurz: BCI) ein alter Hut. Wie der bekannte Hirnforscher Anil Seth in seinem Artikel im Guardian über die Frage, ob wir uns wirklich alle Chips in die Köpfe setzen lassen sollten, anmerkt: Neuralink ist ein Newcomer auf dem Gebiet und die ersten Cursors auf Screens wurden bereits in den 90er Jahren gedankengesteuert. Die tatsächliche Innovation von Musks Firma, ein Operations-Roboter, der die Gehirn-Implantate einsetzt, bleibt bei den jüngsten Meldungen völlig im Dunkeln und Neurowissenschaftler äußern sich besorgt.

Warum Elon Musk mit Neuralink an BCI-Tech arbeitet, liegt auf der Hand: Die Technologie macht (auch ohne Musk) rasante Fortschritte und eine automatisierte Implantierungs-Maschine mit BCI und OP-Robot verspricht gigantischen Profit. Alleine in den letzten 12 Monaten konnten Neurowissenschaftler im Zusammenspiel mit Künstlicher Intelligenz: Einen querschnittsgelähmten Mann wieder laufen lassen, während ein anderer, ebenfalls querschnittsgelähmte Patient seine Arme wieder benutzen und mit seinen Händen fühlen konnte; eine nach einem Schlaganfall paralysierte Frau wieder sprechen lassen mit einer "brain-to-text (...) rate of 78 words a minute"; Musik aus Gehirnaktivität rekonstruieren oder Bilder aus der Aktivität des visuellen Kortex rekonstruieren. In den Jahren zuvor konnte man bereits digitale "Telepathie" ermöglichen und die Gehirne von drei Patienten zu einem Neuro-Netzwerk zusammenschließen.

Der Psychologe Gary Lupyan und der Philosoph Andy Clark haben bei Aeon in einem Aufsatz darüber geschrieben, warum sie nicht an direkte digitale "Telepathie" glauben möchten, kurz zusammengefasst: weil neuronale Aktivität zu idiosynkratisch und individuell ist, um zuverlässig von einer auf eine andere Person übertragen werden zu können. Sie übersehen allerdings dabei, dass AI-Technologie hier als Interpreter zwischen den unterschiedlichen, nun: Wellenlängen der Teilnehmer funktionieren kann. Das allerdings ist tatsächlich Zukunftsmusik und (hoffentlich) noch in weiter Ferne, denn abgesehen von der oberflächlichen SciFi-Coolness digitaler "Telepathie" stellt sich natürlich die Frage, ob ich nun wirklich einen direkten Draht zu den Gedanken anderer Menschen haben möchte, mit all ihren invasiven Gedanken und dem ganzen Neuro-Chaos, den die innere Welt eines Menschen eben ausmacht, oder wie man Zugriff auf "Private Gedanken" denn technisch verhindern könnte. Vielleicht möchte ich eher nicht wissen, was mein Nachbar wirklich über mich denkt -- und andersrum genauso.

Auch stellt Anil Seth im oben bereits erwähnten Text die wichtige Frage, ob sich Menschen für solche Neuro-Spielereien wirklich den Kopf öffnen lassen werden, nur um die chaotischen Gedanken ihrer ebenfalls gehirnimplantierten Nachbarn lesen zu können oder ein paar kognitive Prothesen zu erhalten. Seine Antwort: Nein. Allerdings ist eine invasive Operation in Zukunft anscheinend gar nicht nötig. 

Im Dezember vergangenen Jahres stellten Forscher der Universität Sydney einen nicht-invasiven Brainscanner vor, der von Patienten als einfache EEG-"Kappe" getragen wird. Dessen Signal ist zwar verrauschter, dennoch erreichte man in dem Experiment eine "state-of the art performance" für Brain-2-Text-Outputs, dafür allerdings mit einer relativ hohen Fehlerrate. Es ist dennoch zu erwarten, dass diese non-invasiven Technologien ebenso rasante Fortschritte erzielen, und einen ersten Hinweis auf eine Anwendung in kommenden Massenmärkten gibt es auch bereits: Apple hat im Sommer 2023 ein Patent für EEG-Airpods angemeldet, also In-Ear-Kopfhörer die elektrische Signale des Gehirns lesen können. Man muss tatsächlich kein SciFi-Nerd mehr sein um sich die nächsten Generationen von Apples VR/AR-Brille mit Gehirnschnittstelle vorzustellen.

All diese massiven Fortschritte der BCI-Technologie machen deutlich, dass wir eine breite Debatte in der Öffentlichkeit über die Ethik der Gehirnschnittstellen brauchen. Bereits heute gibt es tausende Fälle von Patienten mit Gehirn-Implantaten, die nach der Pleite eines Startups ohne technischen Support, veraltetem Code und leeren Batterien im Kopf dastehen, und Technology Review schreibt über den Fall von Rita Leggett, eine Patientin mit exzessiven Epilepsie-Anfällen, die ein nahezu normales Leben führen konnte dank des Einsatzes eines neuartigen Implantats, das nach der Pleite des Unternehmens entfernt werden musste -- was einen möglichen Verstoß gegen ihre Menschenrechte darstellt.

Im Juli 2023 organisierte die UNESCO die erste Konferenz für Neuro-Ethik, wo ein Framework für Menschenrechte im Kontext von Neurotechnologien gefordert und das Konzept von Neurorechten erörtert wurde. Chile hatte als erstes Land der Welt bereits im Jahr 2021 seine Verfassung geändert und um explizite Rechte für Neuro-Privacy erweitert. 

Der wissenschaftliche Diskurs zur Neuro-Ethik läuft dagegen bereits seit einigen Jahrzehnten und im Jahr 2006 gründete sich bereits die International Neuroethics Society. Die Papers "on Neurorights" aus dem Jahr 2021 und das Paper "Ethical Aspects of BCI Technology: What is the state of the art?" von 2020 bieten einen guten Überblick über den Stand der Dinge.

Mir persönlich gehen diese ethischen Überlegungen nicht weit genug: KI-Forscher haben vor wenigen Tagen einen Computer Vision-Algorithmus vorgestellt, der Lippen lesen kann, also Sprache aus einem Videosignal decodiert. Was geschieht in einer Gesellschaft, in der ich (nicht nur mit Hirnimplantat, sondern auch bereits mit Smartphones und ihren hochauflösenden Super-Kameras) jedes Gespräch durch einen Blick auf die Sprechenden abhören kann? 

Es ist dank der rasanten Fortschritte in BCI-Technologie absolut denkbar, dass die Signale des visuellen Kortex direkt in ein lippenlesendes AI-Supergehör übersetzt werden. Seit einigen Jahren schon diskutieren wir Phänomene wie Peer Surveillance, in der Menschen neuartige Technologien dazu benutzen, um andere zu überwachen, zu stalken und zu "doxxen" oder in der TikTokker scheinprivaten Gossip-Talk von Fremden veröffentlichen. Neurotechnologie im Zusammenspiel mit Künstlicher Intelligenz hat das Potezial, in den kommenden Jahrzehnten ganze Gesellschaften in wortwörtlich übersinnliche Super-Recognizers zu verwandeln und solche Stories wie ein harmloses Vorgeplänkel aussehen zu lassen. Der "Big Brother" aus Orwells 1984 wird zur "Big Family" in der jeder Mensch zur Überwachung durch andere User freigegeben ist.

Die Debatten über die Sicherheit von Neurodaten der heutigen BCI-Pioniere kann daher nur einen Anfang bilden einer breiten gesellschaftlichen Diskussion darum, wo wir die Grenzen setzen für die neuen brain-enhanced AI/BCI-Cyborgs -- und Nicholas J. Kelley, Stephanie Sheir und Timo Istace nehmen nun all dies zum Anlass, um auf The Conversation eine kurze Geschichte der Neurotechnologie zu erzählen und auf die immensen ethischen Implikationen hinzuweisen. 

Denn: "Die Gedanken sind frei, keiner kann sie erraten" gilt möglicherweise in wenigen Jahren nicht mehr.

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