Nikolai Kardashev was a Soviet radio astronomer and astrophysicist who wanted to know how one could even detect extraterrestrial civilizations at all, the “SETI problem”.

He concluded: by energy consumption. The Kardashev scale is therefore not an ISO standard (ISO = Interstellar Standards Organization?), but a thinking tool devised by one person.

The scale says:

• Type 1: Uses all the energy available to its planet. For example, an albedo-zero world completely covered in solar cells.
• Type 2: Uses all the energy available to its star system. Not a million satellites in orbit, but a Dyson sphere that captures all the light and radiation of a star.
• Type 3: Uses the energy of all stars in a galaxy.

The idea of launching data centers into space, more precisely into LEO, must therefore be evaluated on a different scale:

The Kardashian scale

• A Type 1 civilization on the Kardashian scale has a public discourse that is no longer driven by facts, but by emotion and attention.
• A Type 2 civilization no longer has this discourse under control, and counterfactual emotional discourse begins to control politics, research, and the economy, where unscientific and outright stupid narratives now take over steering.
• A Type 3 civilization has complete epistemic decoupling: visibility has fully replaced truth, reach beats evidence, and consistency is irrelevant as long as the narrative is exciting. Physical limits are dismissed as “bad vibes”, and criticism is read as a moral flaw and subversion.

So we are not measuring energy, but loss of contact with reality. Many tech visions of recent years (everything from and including Bitcoin onward) map directly onto this scale.

We are now already a Kardashian Type 2 civilization.

I live in a small town in Sweden. This morning I went out to my car (realising that I'd once again forgotten to lock the front door last night), drove along empty, wide roads to the nearest largeish town and parked in the brand new multistorey carpark by the railway station, where the first two hours' parking is free and the remainder of the time is very cheap.

I got out of the car without checking my surroundings, and as I leaned back in to get my bag out, I thought "In large parts of the world, I'd be asking to get mugged, or worse".

Then I walked along the clean, well-kept streets to the hospital, where I waited for less than 2 minutes for my mammography, which was completely free of charge.

This is Sweden. This is Europe. Why the FUCK are we trying to emulate, listening to, investing in or in any way having anything whatsoever to do with the utter insanity coming out of the USA?

And I don't just mean under the current, obviously barking, incumbent. I mean ever? They don't do things like we do. They don't believe in the same things that we do. This really is an us and a them situation, and we've been kidding ourselves for the last 80 years that they're like us.

Sometime around the 2020 era, we lost the right to be mediocre at things we love.

No longer can you just bake bread...you must start a sourdough side hustle lol. Wanna stay fit and go jogging or running? Nah, you gotta optimize your biometrics for a marathon. What my point is that every hobby has been enshittified and gentrified into a brand opportunity.

This strange infatuation with optimization culture is killing the human spirit.

So this new year, starting tomorrow, one of my resolutions is to do something bad but fun. Maybe I write a terrible poem. I like to draw and paint, so perhaps I will draw a horse that looks like a table or sing off-key in the showers or in front of my loved ones. The algorithm driving the mainstream social media wants me to be a polished product, but my humanity lives in these messy, unoptimized, cringe-inducing joyful failures.

I will try to reclaim the right to be an amateur. Will you join me?

#creativity #hobbies #art #depression #socialmedia #newyear #resolution #happynewyear #MentalHealth #Culture #enshittification #creative #design #writing #reading #books #drawing #music #gardening #nature #running #fitness

#WordWeavers Dec 8
Does your world have any weird laws, practices or beliefs?

It burns the blood of ancient beings to fuel it, even though doing so hastens the end of all things.