After the Lower House elections in Japan last October, I wrote a note that emphasised the mounting and cumulative stresses on the country.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet : - Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel : - Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller : - Osip Mandelstam, ‘The 19th century’: - Georg Lukacs, Preface to The Theory of Novel : - Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols : - Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities : The Ox and His Herdsman , 十牛図〈八〉人牛倶忘 :

Attending to the world feels like a constantly more challenging task. What to listen to? What to read? What to watch? Overwhelmed, dazed, collectively and individually we stumble from news story to news story. Stocks go up, bombs go down. Reality feels more abstracted and simulated, except for those constant reminders of the really real.

Pete Chambers has coined ‘3SD’ to describe conditions in 2025: Surreal, Stubborn, Stupid + Dangerous, Destructive, Dumb. He eloquently describes these conditions at length here. The quotes below are taken from a pair of recently published notes on involution and simulation.

Last note before a pause. Images from my Yashica T4, quotes from Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows .

One of the core aims of this project is to engage in the practice of open thinking. One of the constant challenges is doing so in conditions that actively impede thought and reflection. Swept up in reactivity and immediacy, weighed down by banality and stupidity. Much of this note is based on some ideas about AI from about two years ago that I have yet to find the space to finish working through.

Watching - and experiencing - big tech march forward with close to zero concern for the societal costs, I keep recalling this talk that Neil Postman gave to Apple employees in 1993. He considers the development of computers in the context of his arguments, emphasising the costs and unexpected consequences that always come with technological developments.

Lost in a dance of reactivity. Recalling some modified adages from previous notes: If a country shows you who they are, believe them. and Combine Occam’s Razor with ‘if it looks like a duck…’ to make: If it looks brutally stupid and/or stupidly brutal, then that is most likely what it is. To which can be added: Fool me first term, shame on you.

Jean Baudrillard, America : - Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Barbarism: A User’s Guide’: - Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel : - Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Wall and the Books’:

Eternally returning to Friedrich Nietzsche.

To restate: In Japanese, there is an expression ame to muchi ( 飴と鞭 ), which translates as ‘candy and whip’. Apparently this was taken from Otto von Bismarck’s expression of ‘ zuckerbrot und peitsche ’ (pastry / sugar bread and whip). These are generally equated with ‘carrot and stick’ in English, the basic idea of positive and negative incentives to shape behaviour.