Make alien abduction weird again

Hereticon, cool maps, a spy movie

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𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (⌛️,⏳) ᚷᚱᛁᛗᛖᛋ @Grimezsz

Hereticon

It's hard for me to think of anywhere I would less rather have been in the United States this week than "Hereticon," the speaking conference put on in Miami by Peter Thiel's venture-capital firm Founder's Fund. Hereticon was first announced in 2019 in a Medium post that touted it as "a conference for thoughtcrime… for people banned from other conferences… a safe space for people who don't feel safe in safe spaces"; after a two-year delay, it finally took place this week at Faena Hotel in Miami Beach. Here's a little taste of the schedule (the full lineup can be found here):

Everyone at Hereticon is on Twitter, of course, so a Twitter search of "Hereticon" will give you some sense of what the conference was like, though this single tweet probably sums it up best:

sotonye🏹🕰 @cybersygh

Witty comment made against democracy during speech at hereticon, Curtis Yarvin laughs harder than anyone

I’ve been following this little corner of the internet for a while now, out of some combination of anthropological interest, morbid curiosity, and propensity to self-harm. If you're not familiar with the Twitter/Substack, S.F-to-Miami, recall-Chesa-Boudin scene being instantiated here, the panel topics can help your orient yourself. It's that particular melange of bloodthirsty libertarianism, wall-eyed contrarianism, gullible futurism, and self-aggrandizing transgression that has for generations marked the right wing of the counterculture — the anti-political hippies Fred Turner called "the New Communalists," who intermingled with and helped birth the software industry. (The mix is ultimately not all that different from what you’d find in Whole Earth and Coevolution.) This branch of the New Communalist family tree now seems something like the tech avant-garde of the Intellectual Dark Web, by day formulating political and policy obsessions, some of which will eventually trickle down to its aging-boomer mass base; by night attending burlesque shows.

Anyway, it was nice to see all my favorite characters gathering together in a boutique hotel to compliment one another on their independent-minded belief systems. But I do have one small complaint: Please leave the real crank stuff to the pros¹. The Hereticon crowd is more than welcome to natalism and polyamory, but if you have any affection at all for the aesthetics or substance of crank science and conspiracy theory, it's a bummer to see it taken up by such a preening, self-conscious, eager crew. Ancient astronauts and ESP (I assume that's what the "High-Bandwidth Non-Verbal Communication" talk on Wednesday was about) used to be the domain of authentic weirdos and obsessives; now it's what venture capitalists and right-wing Substack columnists use as a badge to demonstrate their broad-mindedness. I don't want to accuse anyone of being a fake gamergirl here but: Make alien abduction weird again. UFOlogy should be about UFOs, not about owning the libs.

Here's a cool map:

Ethan Mollick @emollick

This 1881 map is an amazing work that shows the travel time from London to... everywhere. Not only is it one of the first isochronic maps (marking distances that could be traveled in the same time) but it drew on steamship tables, post office records, and private voyage records.

The best movie I watched this week was Wife of a Spy, a 2020 thriller by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It's set in Kobe in 1940, as tensions ratchet up between Japan and the U.S.; the wife of a successful importer-exporter begins to suspect that her husband, who works closely with foreign merchants, is spying for the Americans. It's a beautiful and deliberate Hitchcock thing, though the suspense doesn't really begin to creep in until about halfway through the movie, and doesn't ever quite dissipate in the way you expect out of someone's-lying thrillers like this. If you like period dramas, understated thrillers, and immaculate 1940s fits, it's available on Mubi, and it's, as all movies should be, under two hours.

protein shaker @atikkat

Wow

Last week I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Doors of Eden, an adventure sci-fi novel about (light spoilers, I guess?) a ragtag, cross-dimensional team made up of members of sentient species that have evolved on parallel earths, joining together to prevent the collapse of the universe. I really loved Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which is about terrifying multi-century space journey and also about a civilization of super-smart spiders, and the stuff in Gates of Eden I liked best came out of the same place — speculations on what sentience might look like if it had evolved in different species, like enormous, immortal, space-faring trilobites, or fish that upload their minds into an iceberg computer that can reach across parallel dimensions. I ultimately cared a little less about the actual adventure plot that takes place in the context of the parallel universes than I did about these speculations, but I managed to focus on and finish it, which is more than I can say about 90 percent of things I've started in the last two years. 

This week I've been listening to the Tokyo producer Soshi Takeda's new EP, Same Place, Another Time. Six tracks and 28 minutes of beautiful, cool, elevator music.

1. I should say, to be fair, that Eric Weinstein appears to be an authentic, old-fashioned crank who’s solved the mysteries of politics and economics through the application of something called “gauge theory.” It’s no Time Cube, but I’ll allow it in this context