Death to Greige

I just reread Kate Wagner's piece for The Nation, "Liberating Our Homes From the Real Estate–Industrial Complex" that dissects the rise of greige as a decorating theme, and feel like there's another pernicious incentive at work that wasn't mentioned (or if it was mentioned, I missed it and you can ignore the rest of this!). You should read that first for context.

Back? OK.

At the intersection of platformization and houses-as-assets capitalism is the idea that greigifying everything, as well as eliminating taste, also reduces every house to objects that Zillow and Redfin can most easily monetize, by which I mean attributes that can be counted: square footage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, acreage, age, these are all things that the platforms can readily filter and sort on. Those messy, human characteristics like style and sense of space and environment are things Zillow and Redfin don't know how to sort [except in the crudest of ways], so the platforms would like to eliminate them from the equation. Platformization and greigification go hand in glove.

At its crudest, this reduction to lowest common denominators renders houses scattered across a school district as identikit as the apartments in a new block of rentals so that, for the benefit of capitalism, they can be marketed the same way. The goal is to take individually built houses and render them as the output of mass production after the fact.

Now ask yourself who benefits from this. The answer is "people who want to buy houses in large numbers as assets without actually looking at them". In other words, people who want houses to be not merely assets, but *commodities*. 

And of course, these are not "people" at all, but investment firms. 

Ultimately this is a painful echo of 2008. The original goal of CBOs was to financially commodify mortgages regardless of the underlying properties. Greigification seeks to physically commodify the properties themselves.

p.s. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you should be following Kate's blog, McMansion Hell and her column in The Nation.

Utopia

 

Random thought: are we heading for an economy where the 1% and the 99% become completely economically disconnected? They will control AIs* to do mental work and robots to do physical work and massive amounts of wealth, and so they will have nothing we can afford and we will have nothing they want.

At first it sounds like one of those scifi dystopias where the poor live on a poisoned, ruined planet and the rich live on floating techtopias**, living off the crumbs that fall from their tables, except for the fact that they live in compounds rather than sky islands. But it could go differently.

Before I go any further: please do not piss on my parade. If you think my thought here is hopelessly utopian, you are probably right. I just don't want to hear it right now.

Imagine we choose to economically disconnect from them. They have all the dollars, so we won't use dollars. Their money is no good here. We farm and make things and perform and create arts and take care of each other in our own economy, independent of them, with our own currency or none at all***. Our economy would be based on the value of labor and its exchange, not capital. We can live on real food and read books and listen to live bands and watch actors on stage and care for each other while they eat highly processed junk and stream and read AI generated algorithmic slop while their best friend is a robot butler.

We don't need to overthrow them, as communist manifestos assume. We can just ignore them as they self-isolate, geographically and socially and economically. Now, an obvious objection to this is that they might send in security forces to tell us we can't farm this land because it belongs to them, or that we have to pay them taxes, or to take our produce. In other words, to treat us as an occupied country. However, there are more of us than there are of them. Many more. It would be the kind of occupation where they control only whatever square yard of land they have a solider standing on at any given moment.

Of course, this would mean giving up a lot of technology, but if we're honest, a lot of technology has not made our lives better. We work longer hours than pre-industrial peasants, have less leisure, are more stressed, and spend our time on social networks that make us unhappy by design.

The one great loss would be modern medicine. But considering how unaffordable that is to many Americans already, and how unavailable to most of the world population anyway, that's worth considering. Or maybe it's the one thing we trade food to the rich for. 

Anyway, that's my utopia. What's yours?

—-

Now the footnotes.

* Useful AIs, not LLMs, which are the dumb animal trick of AI. 

** Techtopia is a perfectly valid neologism. Thomas More created "utopia" in 1516 by latinizing greek roots meaning "no" and "place". "Techtopia" parallels that construction. (The root of "tech" is "to weave", by the way.) Arguably it should be Technotopia, since techno- is the combining form of the word, e.g. as in technology, but I think techtopia is snappier. 

***The alternative to currency is not barter, as many would have you believe, but ledgers and optionally fixed rates of exchange for commodities. Ledger-based trade has existed successfully for hundreds of years at a time in thousands of communities, often in parallel with official currencies and barter for untrusted outsiders. See "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber for more exposition than I can fit in a Bsky thread.

A Brief History of Trumpistan

January 21: A coalition of eighteen states led by Texas announce their succession from the United States, forming a new country reviving the name The Confederate States of America, or CSA. The Internet is thrown into a frenzy over whether to call them The Confederacy of Dunces or Trumpistan.

January 22: The CSA issues a correction to say that they meant "secession" all along, but a software bug planted in Google Docs in collaboration with Hugo Chavez auto-carroted it.

Later that day a massive convoy of gun-carrying CSA supporters in pickup trucks adorned with Trump 2020 flags arrives at Fort Sumter. Upon arrival they discover that the fort, which has not been an active military installation since 1947, is only accessible by boat. They mill around in confusion for an hour, fire a few shots in the air for the look of the thing, and return home.

January 23: Mexico announces plans for a wall along its border with Texas. So does New Mexico.

January 24: The United States recognizes the CSA and announces the closure of all Federal facilities in the CSA, including research labs, airports and military bases, decimating the economies of many towns. The Federal government also announces that drivers' licenses or other ID from secessionist states will no longer be accepted for any purposes. Many citizens of the CSA are stranded in Federal states, unable to board a plane, rent a car, or buy alcohol or tobacco. The latter causes widespread panic among the CSA refugees.

January 25: Various Federal states announce that cars with plates from the CSA states are no longer legal on their roads and must be registered in a Federal state. Drivers from West Virginia get pulled over in massive numbers in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Unable to pay the fines, their cars are seized and crushed into scrap metal, in most cases significantly increasing their value.

January 31: The Federal government announces that as of February 1, it will no longer pay Medicare claims from the CSA. There is widespread panic among the citizens as they realize that their new government is completely incapable of providing them with diabetes supplies or Hoverounds. 

February 1: The CSA states meet in constitutional convention at the Austin Convention Center. They meet in the Starbucks as the Center itself is fully booked between an arms and ammo show and a pharmaceutical sales rep convention. Donald Trump is elected Interim President For Life.

February 10: The other six members of the Colorado River Compact announce the expulsion of Utah and plans to build a canal to divert the river around that state. Desperate, the male citizens of Salt Lake City take to the streets in a massive protest. Since this is Utah, it is the most well-behaved, conservatively dressed street protest in the history of the Americas. The women of Salt Lake City fortify the protesters with huge quantities of green Jello.

February 11: Green Jello shortages across Utah drive panicky protesters back into the streets. There is polite rioting and orderly looting of grocery stores. In desperation, many turn to yellow and red Jello.

February 28: CSA citizens begin to notice that no Federal Social Security payments have been received all month. Unable to pay their rent or afford food, white citizens forage for essential supplies, often liberating them from stores without paying, while black people loot.

March 31: After a month of chaos and disorder, Texas asks to rescind its secession. The Federal government accepts it back under strict conditions regarding the fair conduct of elections. 

April (various): One by the one the other CSA states also ask to rejoin the Union. They are all readmitted, except for the Dakotas, which nobody wanted in the first place.

April 30: The CSA is formally disbanded. Donald Trump remains Interim President for Life. 

Turning in my cool card

OK, confession time. This is a list of some of the things and people I never really found funny, even though I may have pretended to like some of them at the time just to be cool with my friends:

• The Goon Show
• Spike Milligan
• Kenny Everett
• Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son for those of you reading this in American)
• Lord of the Rings
• The Young Ones in general, Rik Mayall in particular
• Absolutely Fabulous (other than Joanna Lumley)
• Ben Elton
• Blackadder, Mr Bean, and frankly most of Rowan Atkinson's output except for a handful of sketches
• Alexei Sayle
• Pretty much the entirety of the 1980s UK alternative comedy scene, come to think of it
• Bill Murray, except Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day
• National Lampoon, especially Chevy Chase
• John Hughes
• John Waters

And just for completeness, I lost patience with David Lynch somewhere around 1990. Great, David: nothing is what it appears to be. What the fuck is it then?
Phuh. Feels good to get that off my conscience.

Why we don't live in a simulated universe

There's an oft-repeated theory that our universe is a simulation -- a computer program (or equivalent) created by some higher form of intelligence. The modern popular form of this claim is generally attributed to philosopher Nick Bostrom, although the basic idea goes back much further.

And the only problem with this idea is that it is completely wrong.

The basic "simulation argument" goes like this: imagine that an intelligent race becomes intelligent enough and powerful enough that they could simulate a universe in a computer. (We already do this ourselves, in a very crude sense, when we create computer models to simulate weather or traffic or any other aspect of the real world.) Our hypothetical aliens are able to build such rich simulations, they actually contain simulated intelligent beings of their own -- and those simulated beings would (somehow) perceive themselves to be conscious.

And here's the clever twist: according to the argument, those simulated beings could become intelligent enough to build their own simulated universes, with simulated intelligent beings of their own, who in turn... Eventually, there would be an enormously large pyramid of simulations-within-simulations. And from a simple probabilistic perspective, it's enormously unlikely that we happen to be in the topmost and only real universe (and sometime in the future will ourselves start simulating universes) rather than one of the vast number of simulations.

And this is completely mistaken.

The problem with the argument is that the universe we find ourselves in is enormously complicated from the point of view of having intelligent beings in it. For a start, you could discard the other one hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe and it wouldn't make any difference to us. So it's enormously more likely that the simulated universe we are in would be much simpler than this one. (How much more likely? Borrowing an argument from Roger Penrose, possibly something of the order of 10 to the power [10 to the power 100] -- a 1 with [10 to the power 100] zeroes after it -- more likely.)

So the simulation argument turns on itself: the exact same argument that leads to the conclusion that we live in a simulation, i.e. that there are many more simulations than real universes, also inevitably leads to the conclusion that this universe isn't simulated, because there would be hugely many more simpler simulations we would be more likely to find ourselves in.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Just a Minute...

The internet at large has already covered a lot of what's wrong with BvS, so rather than repeat what's already been said, I'm going to restrict myself to a couple of major things not much touched upon, specifically: the Act 3 climax is a huge mis-fire; and the post-climax codicil makes no sense whatsoever.

First, the climactic battle with Doomsday. The problem here is: who really cares? Comparisons to The Avengers are inevitable, and in that movie we've had all kinds of foreshadowing and build-up: the Avengers must stop Loki from using the Cube and opening the portal, failing every step along the way, until the emotional climax of Stark laying down his life... In BvS by contrast we get a rock-monster with arbitrary powers and an equally arbitrary weakness, that appears deus ex machina (quite literally) with no motivation nor character of any kind, and that is not set up in any emotionally meaningful way by preceding events or threats. And even ignoring the disconnect from the foregoing story, there's neither a logical reason that the Kryptonian spaceship even has the ability to create a Doomsday nor a narrative reason that Lex chooses to do so (contrast Avengers, where opening a portal is Loki's motivation from the very beginning).

Consequently, here there's no sense whatsoever that we're building towards this apocalyptic battle -- a problem highlighted by the fact that Wonder Woman decides to get involved in the fight for no adequately explored reason. (More generally, Wonder Woman is woefully underdeveloped -- and not in an intriguing, "show me more backstory!" kind of way, but in a frustrating "what does she want? why is she doing that?" way.) In fact, given that Luthor's main plot is all about manipulating Superman and Batman over many months into fighting each other, the whole Doomsday plot line feels like it was left over from an entirely different draft of the script. Having made the Batman v Superman conflict the core of their movie, the writers apparently had no idea what to give them to do once they had resolved that conflict.

Second, the post-battle State funeral. Why? In the Death of Superman comic book source material, this makes perfect sense. In the comics arc, Superman is a long-established hero, known and trusted, even loved; and the world watches as he fights Doomsday all the way across the country for days on end, other heroes falling by the wayside, until finally, battered into exhaustion in full view of friends and news cameras, he sacrifices his life to save the world. Of course the world mourns. But in BvS, (i) Superman is mysterious, distrusted, and even disliked; (ii) Doomsday appears out of nowhere and spends around twenty minutes in Metropolis, hardly enough time for everybody to decide that we've tried everything and the world is going to end unless Superman can stop it (frankly, anybody that was there for Zod is probably thinking "meh, I've seen worse"); and (iii) nobody witnesses Superman's self-sacrifice and death except Batman, Wonder Woman, and Lois Lane... but their word is good enough for the US government to throw a funeral fit for a president.

On reflection, the two best sequences in Dawn of Justice are (i) Batman rescuing Martha Kent, and (ii) Wonder Woman fighting Doomsday. The former is the one fight scene that is most true to the Batman character (I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn it was done entirely by the Second Unit); and the latter the only part of the movie where anybody seems to be having fun. Like Doomsday, Wonder Woman seems to have wandered in from the theater next door where she had been starring in a movie that was a lot more fun than the one I was sitting through.

And so it struck me: DC could in fact have made a far more interesting movie if Superman never appeared at all. Sure, he's out there in the world somewhere, motivating Lex and the others to their actions, but never actually seen. Edit out every scene with Kent or Superman (except maybe Bruce's nightmare sequences), give Wonder Woman some proper background and motivation, and you've probably got a pretty decent movie about how the rest of the world feels about Superman, and how it copes when he doesn't come flying to the rescue.

Quantum entanglement does not work like that

Whenever the topic of quantum entanglement -- which Einstein decried as "spooky action at a distance" -- comes up in online conversation, somebody will always ask whether this phenomenon can be used for instantaneous communication. And this is a very reasonable question because although the answer is definitively No, it's far from intuitively obvious why this is so, not least because it depends on details of quantum behavior usually omitted from non-technical explanations -- details that are critical to understanding the phenomenon.

I originally wrote the explanation below in response to a post on Gizmodo. Several people said it was helpful, so I decided to preserve it online for when the question inevitably comes up again.

The Very, Very Short Version

Entanglement allows you to infer what result somebody else's experiment will get; but it doesn't allow you to influence what result they will get.

The long version:

First, entangle your electrons

Suppose you “entangle” two electrons (there are lots of ways to do this; we'll take it as given). What this means is that they are paired in such a way that certain of their properties are reflections of each other. (In technical language we would say they have a "shared state".) In particular, we are interested in the so-called "spin". So you send me one electron and keep the other. Now you measure yours to see if it's spin is pointed up or down; if you find yours is up, you’ll know that if I do the same experiment, mine is pointed down; and vice versa. (The entangled electrons are always opposite, like two sides of a coin). 

Importantly, you won’t know whether you’ll get up or down until you do the experiment -- it’s a coin toss. The only way to tell which is the Up electron and which is the Down, by definition, is to do the measurement. 

Anyway: so far, so normal. Up to this point, it's really no more surprising than if you had split a coin down the middle and sent one half to me. It's no surprise that if you kept the heads side, I got the tails side.

But note the really important part here: I can't use this to send you a signal. The typical misunderstanding at this point is to think that since the electrons are always opposite, if I somehow force my electron into the Up position before measuring, yours will instantaneously be in the Down position, and from there with enough entangled electrons I can easily construct a binary code. And the simple fact is, entanglement does not work like that. Although the electrons are opposite to begin with, anything I do to change the state of my electron does not change the state of yours; instead it just breaks the entanglement. I can no more flip your electron by flipping mine than I can turn your half of the coin from heads to tails.

Let's get spooky

But now it gets quantum. Unlike a coin, there are lots of ways you can measure spin: in fact you can choose any axis you want to measure it along. You don’t have to measure whether your electron is pointing up or down like this: |. You could measure whether it is pointing left or right, like this --. Or along any in-between axis, like / or \. 

Now here's the critical part: electron spin is quantized. This means that whatever axis you measure spin on, the answer will always be precisely "+1" or "-1" units of spin (using the units that physicists typically choose), regardless of what state you thought the electron was previously in; in other words, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Yes, even if you think your equipment only generates up and down electrons, if you choose to measure it on the left-right axis, its spin will definitely be measured as either one unit of left or right spin. Oh, and of course if I measure mine on the same axis, it is pointing the other way. Or you could measure it on any orientation in between, and if I measure it on the same orientation, I get the opposite.

There is no analogy in the macroscopic world for this behavior that I can think of. If you had, say, a spinning basketball and you measured it's spin as "+1" in the up/down axis, it's spin on the left/right axis would be 0, and its spin in the / or \ directions would be somewhere between 0 and 1. This is a crucial difference between the quantum world and the familiar classical world.

One of the things this tells us is that, unlike basketballs and other classical objects, electrons don't have a definite spin until you measure it (and even then, that spin is only good until you measure it again on a different axis).

It gets worse (or maybe better)

Now, we’re not done. Up to now we've always measured our electrons on the same axis. It gets even spookier if you and I choose to measure our electrons along different orientations. 

Suppose you measure on the | axis and, say, get Up; but I choose to measure on the -- axis. Now two things I said above seem to be in conflict: 

• entangled spins are always opposite, so mine must be Down; but 
• if I measure left/right I must get precisely left or right. 

So what happens? Well, in fact I get left or right, and with an equal chance of each. It’s as if my electron was pointing Down after your experiment, and randomly chose which of left or right to flip to when I measured it.

Notice, by the way, that when I do my measurement, nothing now happens to your electron. If you were to subsequently measure your electron on the -- axis, your result would be completely random. The moment you measured your electron the first time, the entanglement was over. So no amount of cleverness with repeated measurements will let me send a signal either.

The really hard part

Now I do something even more interesting: instead of measuring --, I set my equipment at an angle to yours, lets say at /. If we think of a clock face with Up/Down at 12 o’clock / 6 o’clock, I set mine at 1 o’clock / 7 o’clock. Now what happens? 

What I find is that when your result is Up (12), I’ll get 7 most of the time and 1 some of the time (the exact proportions can be predicted, and have been demonstrated experimentally literally billions of times). And if your result was Down (6), I get the opposite results; mostly 1, some 7. Somehow, my electron “knows” what axis you measured along and what result you got -- even though the orientation was not fixed at the beginning before the electrons separated. In fact, even the orientations of our measurements can be chosen long after the electrons have separated, yet the entanglement still occurs. 

So maybe there's something here that can be used to communicate? Maybe you can send a signal with the way you choose the axis you measure on, since that influences the distribution of my measurements on a different axis? 

Unfortunately, no. And the reason is this:

Remember that when you measure on your end, you always get a random result, either up or down. You can’t force your electron to Up, and thereby influence my distribution; you can only discover whether it is Up or Down (and then infer what I am seeing). You can choose the axis you measure on, but not the outcome you get. (You can't even "separate out" the Up electrons from the Down: the only way to know which is which is to measure them, which destroys the entanglement.) And since you are getting 12 or 6 at random, to me it looks like I'm getting 7 or 1 at random too.

One last throw of the dice?

So perhaps there is one last loophole. If being entangled affects the measurements I get, maybe there is some way I can tell whether our electrons are still entangled? Since entanglement breaking is also instantaneous, maybe that in itself can be used to send a message? But no. Even while our electrons are still entangled, your stream of results looks completely random to you. Similarly on the other end, whatever I measure looks completely random to me: 1 or 7, 7 or 1, with no pattern. It’s only when we bring our results together that we see that whenever you got 12 I was more likely to get 7, and whenever you got 6 I was more likely to get 1, thereby proving that our electrons were entangled.

This is what physicists mean when they say our results are correlated, and the degree of correlation (as mentioned above) is precisely predictable, and has been tested in the lab. But it's only by bringing our results together that we see the correlation -- in isolation, each of us appears to get a random series of results. And bringing our results together to compare requires conventional slower than light communication.

(By the way, this is the basis of quantum cryptography, but that's a long story for another time.)

So in summary...

A lot of the confusion here comes from non-technical explanations being loose in their language when they say that one electron "influences" the other. This is true in the sense explained above -- the result I measure is linked at a distance (yes OK, Albert, "spookily") to the result you measure. But it's not true in the sense that you could change your electron and instantaneously cause a change in my electron. Any change you make to your electron in an attempt to change mine simply breaks the entanglement, and our results are no longer connected in any way.