“We exchange something very precious for money: our life energy. Do we want to spend our time and energy earning money and contributing to the market economy, or fostering creative pursuits, our relationships, and community, and contributing love?”

Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream by William Powers

There continues to be a lot of “discussion” concerning AI. I have not taken a stand on this blog, preferring to follow around @apoorplayer and make counter-arguments, which is just sort of trollish. So let me write here and give him a chance to follow me around for once.

Let me start with a personal story. On St Patrick’s Day 1978, my mother, who had just turned 42, died of liver cancer. I was 19 at the time, and dropped out of my freshman year at college to help during her illness, which lasted about 5 months. After her diagnosis, she went through surgery, but they found that the tumor was inoperable. They then treated her with an experimental chemotherapy, which made her extremely sick while leaving her cancer unimproved. We then decided not to go further, and she died a few months later.

Even today, the survival rate for liver cancer is low–37% in the best case scenario. However, the American Cancer Society notes “People now being diagnosed with liver cancer may have a better outlook than these numbers show. Treatments improve over time, and these numbers are based on people who were diagnosed and treated at least five years earlier."

Stating the obvious, she would likely have a better chance of survival, or at least a longer life, if she was diagnosed in 2025 than in 1978. There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering about this generally-accepted fact. Nevertheless, the problem with liver cancer is that it is often not diagnosed until it is advanced beyond the localized stage, which greatly reduces survival rates. One area of research is trying to discover biomarkers that would lead to earlier detection, or to treatment before the cancer developed at all. “Despite the significant advances in cancer biomarker research,” the website for cancer research lab Creative Biomart explains, “several challenges remain.”

One major challenge is the heterogeneity of cancer, where different parts of the same tumor or different tumors in the same patient may have distinct biomarker profiles. This complexity requires comprehensive and dynamic biomarker panels to capture the full picture. Another challenge is the need for standardization and validation of biomarker assays to ensure consistent and reliable results across laboratories and clinical settings.

They then say:

“Looking forward, the integration of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning with biomarker research holds great promise. These technologies can analyze large datasets to identify novel biomarkers and predict treatment outcomes more accurately. In addition, the development of non-invasive biomarker tests, such as liquid biopsies, will further revolutionize cancer detection and monitoring.”

The research to identify biomarkers is largely built on AlphaFold technology. In 2021, Forbes published an article describing the breakthroughs of AlphaFold2 (we are currently on AlphaFold3). “In 1972, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Christian Anfinsen made a historic prediction,” that “it should in principle be possible to determine a protein’s three-dimensional shape based solely on the one-dimensional string of molecules that comprise it.” The Forbes author continues:

Finding a solution to this puzzle, known as the “protein folding problem, has stood as a grand challenge in the field of biology for half a century. It has stumped generations of scientists. One commentator in 2007 described it as “one of the most important yet unsolved issues of modern science. AI just solved it.”

Before AlphaFold, they continue, “we knew the 3-D structures for only about 17% of the roughly 20,000 proteins in the human body. Those protein structures that we did know had been painstakingly worked out in the laboratory over the decades through tedious experimental methods like X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance, which require multi-million-dollar equipment and months or even years of trial and error. Suddenly, thanks to AlphaFold, we now have 3-D structures for virtually all (98.5%) of the human proteome.”

AlphaFold technology “is widely employed in various aspects of diagnostic research, such as the study of disease biomarkers, microorganism pathogenicity, antigen-antibody structures, and missense mutations.”

All of that was about AlphaFold2; AlphaFold 3 was announced on 8 May 2024. “It can predict the structure of complexes created by proteins with DNA, RNA, various ligands, and ions. The new prediction method shows a minimum 50% improvement in accuracy for protein interactions with other molecules compared to existing methods. Moreover, for certain key categories of interactions, the prediction accuracy has effectively doubled.”

AlphaFold is owned by Alphabet’s AI lab DeepMind, and the source code of AlphaFold 3 was made available for non-commercial use to the scientific community upon request in starting in November 2024. So instead of requiring each lab undertaking such research to purchase multi-milion dollar equipment, Alphabet has made it free for non-commercial use, which means that more researchers have access and the chance of solutions increase accordingly.

Thanks to AI, there is a chance that we will see significant breakthroughs that will prevent some other 19-year-old kid from having to watch their mother die.

So this is why I find it difficult to get worked up about LLMs getting “trained” on your texts. There are bigger fish to fry, and your complaints are negatively affecting public opinion about an technological breakthrough that should be celebrating because it could solve this and many, many other complex problems that threaten humanity.

I have had it with US politics. It’s not because–or not ONLY because–the Trump Administration’s policies (I use the term extremely loosely) are uninformed, haphazard, and abusive, it’s because the entire process has become superficial and narrow. And while the Republicans seem to have cornered the market on superficial, narrow stupidity, the Democrats aren’t that far behind them.

The political system has been entirely taken over by marketing people. Political discourse is like one 30-second commercial after another, no vision, no depth, just slogans. No real sense of commitment or belief. No sense that anyone actually cares about something more important than getting re-elected. Exactly what in the hell did the Harris/Walz ticket stand for except “we’re nicer than they are” and “IT’S THE END OF DEMOCRACY! ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!”

When was the last time you heard a politician say anything that was inspiring? I mean truly inspiring, rhetorically inspiring? “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” inspiring? When was the last time you heard a politician quote a poem or a novel or a play? When did they last refer to a philosopher or a songwriter who wasn’t Taylor Swift? Campaign speeches have become a series of social media posts strung together in a row with all the energy and excotement of listening to a bowling ball rolling down the basement steps. Debates are no longer about ideas but just about gotchas, name calling, and fact-checking.

The alternative has been something like Elizabeth Warren’s “I’ve got a plan for that.” That’s not a vision , that’s a to-do list, and about as inspiring. “Hey, I’m smart–vote for me” is about you, not me or the people I care about. Nor does it make me want to go out and help make things happen. Biden never could inspire anyone, and once 2020 came and he was told he needed to be “stronger,” he just turned into an unpleasant, combative old man trying to sound tough. I’m surpriosed he didn’t get a tattoo. I like Pete Buttigieg because he’s good at explaining things in pleasant and accessible terms, but does he ever say anything that makes you want to yell “Hell, yeah”? (If so, you’ve lowered the bar for inspiration so low that all it takes is someone who isn’t bearing a chainsaw to earn your kudos.)

It’s time to start reading again, politicians! And I’m not talking about the latest Mitch Albom bestseller. Read something hard, read something beautiful, read something soaring. Keep an eye out for metaphors and analogies that can serve to illuminate something happening today, or better yet something that could improve the future. You want to differentiate yourself from the mouth-breathing Repubicans? Tell us something we didn’t know, surprise us with an idea we never thought of before. Not a string of factoids and numbers, but stories, images, examples, aspirations. Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride showed us how it’s done: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” That’s prophetic speech–a description of something wrong that happened in the past followed by a vision for the future. Something the speaker was committed to do or would die trying, and that made us want to cheer him on. I don’t need you to make me smile because you can dance–or can’t dance, as the case might be. After we saw Tim Walz talking while changing his truck’s air filter once, the joke got old. It was a marketing idea that was about an inch deep. “Oh, look, Tim is such a guy.” But let him talk about why feeding schoolchildren breakfast and lunch is the right thing to do and he comes across as passionate, committed, authentic, caring.

So it’s not about anger–anybody can look stern, sound angry, pound the lectern, scowl into the camera. That’s Trump’s whole schtick. No, it’s about something authentic, heroic, determined. Believe in something.

Inspiration doesn’t come from a spreadsheet; it comes from the heart, the guts, the emotions. Kick the marketers out of the room, refuse to pay attention to another poll, and follow your principles. Make us feel alive again.

(This post is the result of writing I’ve been doing on my personal project.]

I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s 1970 classic Deschooling Society and John McKnight’s The Careless Society. I’ve admired the ideas of these two people over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that they actually knew each other and that McKnight was greatly influenced by the time he spent with Illich. Reading the two books side by side (not literally!), it is clear you can draw a line directly from Deschooling Society to The Careless Society. It is probably more accurate to say that McKnight’s asset-based community organizing, as outlined in [Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets]((https://search.worldcat.org/title/36708153) is the how-to to Illich’s why-to. McKnight focuses on determining a community’s _assets _instead of its deficits; not what does it lack, but what does it have; not what can be done _for_it, but what can it do for itself. The goal is to allow the community to do for itself, rather than call on a “professional” to do it for them.

This feels right to me. It feels empowering. And the reason it feels empowering is that it is relying on what and who are to hand to shape their world. Nobody has to be professionally trained, nor do they need to have the latest gear to make everything all ooh-shiny.

There’s a guy my wife watches on YouTube who calls himself the Bike Farmer. He has a bike shop in Wisconsin and he posts videos of him fixing old bikes he’s rescued. He has a phrase he often uses–“Good enough for who it’s for”–that I think applies here. It isn’t that he’s proposing sloppy work and bad stuff–“good enough for government work”–but rather that most people don’t really have the need for all the bells and whistles. What they need is to get out on the road. But YouTube (or PeerTube) is jampacked with how-to videos showing you how to make or do something or repair something yourself. People helping people. And while, as with everything online, there is some pressure to “monetize” their videos, most people make videos because they like sharing their skills.

My friend Tom (@apoorplayer) recently posted a video he found and PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.

This is true for theater people. How many years do young people spend waiting tables, going to auditions, and working in the theater only intermittently, when the amount of money they are spending could be used to create their own theater where they and their fellow artists can actually do the work they want to do. They don’t need the most expensive lighting and sound equipment, or a scene or costume shop; they don’t need to spend a bunch of money on marketing; they just need to do the work. Do a show in your apartment, in your back yard, on the library’s stage, in the church basement or senior center.

Look around at your neighborhood, at your friends, and see what assets you have available, and then build on that. In many ways (and I just realized this), my previous two books, Building a Sustainable Theater and DIY Theater MFA are built on this concept of asset-based organization. You don’t need the institutionalized approach – just do the work!

I began a new project a few days ago. In many ways, it is the opposite of the Learn in Public orientation. In fact, it is intentionally Learn in Private.

I have been writing (and learning, and sharing) in public for 20 years, and it has been great. I’ve learned a lot, and I flatter myself in thinking that my writing made at least a little difference to those who were trying to re-imagine theater. But the overlap between the Venn Diagram of Learning in Public and Teaching in a Classroom is almost total, at least for me, and that has become somewhat of a crutch. To teach involves an outward orientation: what does the student/reader need to know in order to understand this step? What does the student need to hear at this moment? Even though I retired in 2020, I have found myself continuing in the habit of asking these questions as I’ve written books and blog posts.

In addition, when I started in blogging in 2005, the scene was a lot like social media today–very contentious. Either you were reacting to someone else, or you were the one being reacted to. And soon I found I was becoming like Benvolio as described by Mercution in Romeo and Juliet:

Thou—why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. What eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling. Thou hast quarreled with a man for coughing in the street because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter? With another, for tying his new shoes with old ribbon?

In my defense, there were a lot of quarrels that needed to be had. But eventually all this becomes a habit rather than a choice, and (to quote Shakespeare again) you become “damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.”

So it’s time for me to learn how to have an inward orientation. To ask not what does the student need, what argument needs to be countered, what information is missing from the world, but rather what do I need. And that’s a question I have avoided.

At 66, I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking over the years, about a variety of topics. My specialty is theater, obviously, specifically theater history and criticism, but I have done an enormous amount of reading in literary criticism, rural issues, theology, philosophy, political philosophy, education, entrepreneurship, business models, myth and anthropology, psychology, social media, economics, anarchism, and many, many more. Lately, I’ve been having an interesting experience of encountering, in something I’m reading or a podcast I’m listening to, a person or movement or idea that provides the link between two people/movements/ideas that I’ve previously encountered and appreciated, but seemed to be floating out there in mental space without a context or tradition. So I want to spend some time taking a step or two back in order to try to recognize the pattern in my own carpet – i.e., to examine my intellectual journey and figure out what I believe. And in order to do that, I have to learn how to look inward.

I hasten to say that this is not some sort of an announcement that I am not going to continue to write publicly, about theater or anything else. I fully anticipate that I will continue doing so, perhaps even more frequently, with the only possible change being a broader pallette of thoughts. But I will also have this private project that I likely won’t share with anyone except maybe family at some point.

Maybe you’re curious what this might look like. I can tell you it won’t be linear–I’m not writing an autobiography. It will be more like the independent web of the early days: a bunch of pages on different topics hyperlinked together. I’ll be using Obsidian, which is what Obsidian is best at. I suspect the result might look like an Obsidan graph view:

But for readers, it will be like a choose-your-own-adventure book of pages with text and links. Nothing fancy.

My hope is that this process, which I expect will go on for quite a while (if not the rest of my life) will lead to greater self-understanding, as well as to future sources of inspiration–“breaking bread with the dead” (and the living!), as @ayjay would say. And I also hope the process will lead to intellectual or emotional explosions in my mind, like a star exploding in space, producing a massive burst of light, heat, and high-energy particles along with a shockwave of expanding intellectual material. Enlightenment! Or a major headache. One or the other.

On the other hand, it might just be a private version of digital gardening where I can putter to keep my mind active. Either way, it is a net plus.

If you have any examples or suggestions, feel free to share. I see something like Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, or Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language as inspiration. I know there are many more precursors, and that this is nothing new or original. But I think it will make me happy, which I’m trying to learn is sometimes enough.

I wrote this in 2008, and it still is true today:

From Daniel Quinn’s deceptively simple and inspiring Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure:

The river I mentioned earlier is the river of vision. Our culture’s river of vision is carrying us toward catastrophe. Sticks planted in the mud may impede the flow of the river, but we don’t need to impede its flow, we need to divert it into an entirely new channel. If our culture’s river of vision ever begins to carry us away from catastrophe and into a sustainable future, then programs will be superfluous. When the river’s flowing where you want it to flow, you don’t plant sticks to impede it.

Old minds think: How do we stop these bad things from happening? New minds think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?

No Programs at all?

Programs make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing. If programs actually did the things people expect them to do, then human society would be heaven: law enforcement would work, our justice systems would work, our penal systems would work, and so on.

When programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on things like poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training. When programs fail, look for them to be replaced by new ones with improved design, increased funding and staff, superior management, and better training. When these new programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training.

This is why we spend more and more on our failures every year. Most people accept this willingly enough, because they know they’re getting more every year: bigger budgets, more laws, more police, more prisons – more of everything that didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that.

Old minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do MORE of it this year. New minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do something ELSE this year. (p 8-9)

I’m trying, as best as I can, to think of something else. To not come up with a new program – more government funding, more foundation support, better marketing, higher wages – but a new vision of things the way we want them to be. Or at least, the way I and a few others who are following this blog want them to be. But let’s be clear: if you’re happy where you are, and you’re happy doing what you do the way you do it, then by all means keep doing it. Don’t mind me. This blog does not exist to make you feel guilty, or foolish, or craven, or misguided because you are following a more traditional path.

But if the way things were done last year didn’t work for you, then let’s try to do something else this year. I’m piecing together my intellectual Legos one way; there are many, many other ways they snap together. I can’t guarantee I have found The Way. Hell, I’m still trying to determine through the mist of my imagination and knowledge what my way is!

When i largely disconnected from social media, I remembered what it was like to have only my own thoughts to entertain myself. It was the main reason I started reading so much – to make me more interesting to myself!