daniel.industries

I Love Mycelial Musical Rabbit Holes

2026-05-17T12:06:18-05:00

Oh I need a letter, ooh I need a letter
Oh I need a letter but not that kind
I don’t need a letter to help me remember
What is not, what was never mine
Ooh I need a letter, oh I need a letter
Oh I need a letter but not that kind

Love letter is delightfully anachronistic. Who writes letters anymore?

I do send cards. I sent one recently and the recipient’s first words to me the next time he saw me were, “You have really nice handwriting.” It was the best compliment I’ve received all month. Literally nobody has complimented me on my handwriting before.

Jonah Matranga’s song from the early 2000s started playing in my head, but only the melody and the word “letter”. I knew in which universe it came from, but I couldn’t remember Jonah or onelinedrawing. But I remembered who introduced me to Jonah’s work: Keith Michaud. He used to cover a couple of Jonah’s songs back in the day. But I couldn’t remember that band or those songs either. I scrolled my streaming service of the moment, I scrolled my Bandcamp collection and wishlist.

Finally I flipped through my guitar songbook. There it was: Lukewarm. The song I took to covering because of Keith’s inspiring renditions inside humid Palm Beach bars.

Thriller by New End Original

Keith also covered #1 Defender. That one got the punters singing along.

Thriller by New End Original

But neither of those were the letter song. Anyway, I had enough of a lead to find the onelinedrawing records on Bandcamp, and Yr Letter.

Scrolling through the aforementioned libraries and wishlists, it is truly an embarrassment of riches. I had to hold myself from playing a record and thus distracting myself from my rabbit hunt. Every record I wanted to reach for, that desire did not originate from anything the algorithm could know or predict.

Negativland, who I went to see give a talk at the University of Arizona and was immediately enthralled by. The Lost Dogs and The Throes channeling Uncle Tupelo and R.E.M. respectively for my heady christian alternative college years in the mid-1900s. Michael Knott, one of the greats, who my fellow christian outcasts in South Florida introduced me to (we watched him pour clam chowder over his head in Palm Beach and then went drinking with him, stars in our eyes). Mice Parade and Jaga Jazzist, who showed me electronic music could be more than the cage-rattling four on the floor from the discotheques in Eastern Europe. Miranda July’s audio work, discovered either before or right after falling in love via Me and You and Everyone We Know. All the Dallas bands: The New Year, friend’s side projects, Paul Slavens, far too many more to list here. Crazy good drummers making all kinds of things.

I have to stop that list at some point. I think you can go look for yourself.

Before platforms, music wove its stories into yours. Before algorithms, we were all co-creators. Yeah, I’m nostalgic. Yeah, I have no idea WTF is on the radio.

This is a love letter to sticky bars, record bins, internet rabbit holes, folks who remember what it meant to not sell out, figuring out what show to go to by talking to friends, singing along, hi-fis.

I don’t technically have a house in the ‘burbs or a bitchin’ SUV, but I’m undeniably lukewarm these days. This is a love letter to fervor.

Pathologizing Our Own Humanity

2026-05-11T18:28:10-05:00

📺️ Why toxic positivity is making us miserable

When I got cancer, people often told me that everything happens for a reason, and what they meant was that I will learn important lessons that will eventually enrich my life if it doesn’t kill me. But some things happen for no good reason. Sometimes in life we have to step up to the edge of the great mystery and in the face of mystery we can’t always say, we will know why.

If we don’t have a wider range than a toxic positivity, we threaten to stigmatize negative emotions and then eventually start to pathologize our own humanity.

📺️ Why Doing Nothing Feels Illegal Now

…the thing is you’re probably not that bad at focusing. It’s just that you’ve been psychologically waterboarded by notifications since approximately 2009…

Schopenhauer had this observation that human beings basically oscillate perpetually between desire and boredom. And that when we’re not frantically chasing something, we are miserable from the wanting.

But then when we actually finally get the thing, we’re almost immediately bored and then we start reaching for the next thing. And well, his conclusion was basically that most of human activity is just like an elaborate boredom avoidance process. Which you might see as a pretty dark perspective…but…have you been on the internet lately?

What Schopenhauer said tracks and I think about Hirayama in that context because he’s essentially doing the thing that Schopenhauer identified as the hardest thing. He stepped off the oscillation somehow and he didn’t do it because he got everything he wanted. He just stopped the chasing. And…I think the thing that makes his life look so strange to most people is his contentment…in spite of the toilet cleaning.

We don’t really have a framework for that anymore because in our culture, contentment reads as a sort of failure or delusion. And the gap, you know, the one that the algorithm depends on, contentment closes that gap. And a closed gap is bad for business.

So instead we pathologize it and we call it giving up, you know, lack of ambition and all that. And Hirayama doesn’t seem particularly impressed with any of that, which already makes him more psychologically stable than most of the internet in my opinion.

Pull

2026-05-09T10:09:34-05:00

Illustration by Resource Database

The first chamber was larger than the second. Wren heard and felt the pneumatic doors close behind them and was careful to place one foot next to the other, in a stable stance, and took hold of the handrails. They felt their boots lock onto the walkway. The loud, mechanical horn blared its single warning and clouds of thin white mist filled the room. Wren stared straight ahead but could see in the peripheral vision possible through their helmet’s visor the particles cling to their suit. In seconds they covered the visor as well.

A loud thump, and Wren gripped the handrails as the g-forces compounded in milliseconds. The sound of rushing air audible but dampened through their helmet. The visor cleared and they watched as their suit became clean, a white tornado cloud forming below and then disappearing just as quickly, another mechanical bang, their arm muscles relaxing reflexively, their boots freed.

Wren began walking as the forward doors whooshed open. Now they had to make a decision. As they entered the second, smaller chamber, the one with the red bottom suspended on a pole bolted to the walkway, they thought back across their day. Flashes of blades tearing at flesh, blood streaking across the air, faces–those faces–twisted to begin with, contorting in pain, those eyes–inhuman, lightless–still registering the darkness as it descended upon what remained of their souls.

They saw an image of a child–would you call it a child?–cowering in a shadow. Was that real? As they walked, Wren tried to recall, reconstruct the memory from a glance allowed in a single second while their autonomous movement completed its follow-through. They saw eyes, fear. Then movement further into the shadows.

It didn’t matter if it was real or not. Wren walked up to the button, removed their helmet, and slammed their hand down. A flexible tube with a small mouthpiece descended and they inhaled from it, lungs filling, brain tingling. Then, with a much gentler mechanical warning, that same gravity, this time just within her skull, something like particles being pulled down, along the sides, behind their ears, down their neck.

The next set of doors opened, and Wren walked forward, free to do the Lord’s work once again.

This is my submission for May’s IndieWeb Fiction Carnival.

Some Fiction

2026-05-03T08:15:04-05:00

I finished Accelerated Growth Environment a couple of days ago. I enjoyed it. It is a good length–sometimes a too-long story can result in a DNF for me–but the first ~third is pretty slow paced and then the rest is fast, to the point I saw the progress indicator and wondered how it was going to wrap up (what I actually thought was “This book must have almost no falling action,” which is basically true). It also didn’t wrap in any particularly clever way, which isn’t a fault, just something I’ve come to expect. (On the other hand, I’ve been accused of leaving my plots unfinished, leaving it up to the reader to imagine their own ending.) But the plot involves a religious cult, which, having been in one, always stimulates my interest.

More times than I can count, I’ve returned to fiction and realized I needed to make sure I didn’t lose the habit. I scanned my digital libraries for a new fiction book to pick up (why is that not a filter option in either of them?!), and my book collecting is heavily weighted non-fiction¹, so it takes a lot of scrolling. I haven’t picked one yet. I opened Gravity and Grace first instead, which has been on my mind to get through. It turned out to be so impactful just in the introduction that I was compelled to post a big chunk of it. This morning it feels too heavy to dive back into.

But yesterday morning these delightful pieces of short fiction crossed my desk:

📃 How to Enjoy Eternal Life

📃 A beautiful day on Colony 12

📃 Sharing is caring

The author of the last two, Ben Werdmuller (who I have read on the internet longer than I can remember), is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Fiction Carnival. I have an idea, but haven’t figured out how to start it, so I’m posting this instead.

After posting this I realized I had purchased another Shiraki book, Wine for Roses and just not uploaded it to my e-reader yet. This is probably my move.

Because said collecting is very aspirational; but then, I find non-fiction harder to finish. ↩

Gravity

2026-05-02T07:51:23-05:00

Gustave Thibon, in the intro to Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. I’m assuming the quotes are Simone¹, and have italicized them.

Creation reflects God by its beauty and harmony, but, through the evil and death which abide in it and the blind necessity by which it is governed, it also reflects the absence of God. We have issued from God: that means that we bear his imprint and it means also that we are separated from him. The etymology of the word to exist (to be placed outside) is very illuminating in this respect: we can say we exist, we cannot say we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist: he has given up being everything in order that we might exist; he has dispossessed himself in our favour of his own necessity, which is identical with goodness, to allow another necessity to reign which is alien and indifferent to good. The central law of this world, from which God has withdrawn by his very act of creation, is the law of gravity…

Psychologically it is shown by all those motives which are directed towards asserting or reinstating the self, by all those secret subterfuges (lies of the inner life, escape in dreams or false ideals, imaginary encroachments on the past and the future, etc.) which we make use of to bolster up from inside our tottering existence, that is to say, to remain apart from and opposed to God.

Simone Weil presents the problem of evil as follows: ‘How can we escape from that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves?’ By grace alone. In order to come to us God passes through the infinite thickness of time and space; his grace changes nothing in the play of those blind forces of necessity and chance which guide the world; it penetrates into our souls as a drop of water makes its way through geological strata without affecting their structure, and there it waits in silence until we consent to become God again. Whereas gravity is the work of creation, the work of grace consists of ‘decreating’ us. God consented through love to cease to be everything so that we might be something; we must consent through love to cease to be anything so that God may become everything again. It is therefore a question of abolishing the self within us, ‘that shadow thrown by sin and error which stops the light of God and which we take for a being.’ Without this utter humility, this unconditional consent to be nothing, all forms of heroism and immolation are still subject to the law of gravity and falsehood: ‘We can offer nothing short of ourselves. Otherwise what we term our offering is merely a label attached to a compensatory assertion of the “I”’.

In order to kill the self we must be ready to endure all the wounds of life, exposing ourselves naked and defenseless to its fangs…

The self should be destroyed in us from within by love. But its destruction can also be brought about from without by extreme suffering and degradation. There are vagrants and prostitutes who have no more self-esteem than the saints and whose life is confined to the passing moment. Therein lies the tragedy of degradation. It is irreparable, not because the self which it destroys is precious, for the self is made to be destroyed, but because it prevents God from effecting the destruction himself and robs eternalizing love of its prey.

Simone Weil makes a sharp distinction between this supernatural immolation and all forms of human grandeur and heroism. Here below God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul; to go to him we have to labour in the void, to refuse every intoxication of passion or pride which veils the horrible mystery of death, and to allow ourselves to be guided only by the ‘still, small voice’ spoken of in the Bible—a voice inaudible to the senses and unnoticed by the self. ‘To say to Christ as Saint Peter did: “I will always be faithful to thee”, is to deny him already, for it is to suppose that the source of fidelity is in ourselves and not in grace. As he was chosen, this denial was made known to all men and to himself. How many others boast in the same way—and never understand.’ It is easy to die for something forceful because participation in force produces an intoxication which stupefies us. But it is supernatural to die for something weak… ‘Supernatural love has no contact with force, moreover it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection against the coldness of steel. Armour is made of metal in the same way as the sword. If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.’

The hero wears armour, the saint is naked. Now armour, while keeping off blows, prevents any direct contact with reality and above all makes it impossible to enter the third dimension which is that of supernatural love. If things are really to exist for us they have to penetrate within us. Hence the necessity for being naked: nothing can enter into us while armour protects us both from wounds and from the depths which they open up. All sin is an attack against the third dimension, an attempt to bring back to the plane of unreality and painlessness an emotion which seeks to penetrate to the depths. This law is inexorable: we lessen our own suffering to the extent that we weaken our inner and direct communion with reality. At the extreme limit of this process life is entirely stretched out on the surface: we suffer no more except in a dream, for existence, reduced to two dimensions, becomes flat like a dream. This holds good for consolations, illusions, boasting and all the compensatory reactions by which we try to fill up the hollows bitten into us by reality. Every empty place or hollow does in fact imply the presence of the third dimension; it is not possible to enter into a surface, and to fill up a hole is equivalent to taking refuge in isolation on the surface. The adage of ancient physics: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, is strictly true in psychology. But this vacuum is precisely what grace needs in order to come into us.

This process of ‘decreation’, which is the only way of salvation, is the work of grace and not of the will. Man does not pull himself up to heaven by the hair. The will is only useful for servile tasks; it controls the right use of natural virtues, which are pre-requisites of the work of grace, in the same way as the ploughman’s effort must precede the sowing. But the divine seed comes from elsewhere…. In this realm Simone Weil, like Plato and Malebranche, considers attention to be of far more importance than will: ‘We must be indifferent to good and evil, really indifferent; that is to say, we must turn the light of attention equally on each of them. Then the good will triumph by an automatic phenomenon.’ It is precisely this superior automatism which has to be created; it is not obtained by tightening up the self and ‘going beyond one’s capacity’ (forçant son talent) for doing good (nothing is more degrading than a noble action performed in an unworthy spirit) but by arriving through self-effacement and love at that state of perfect docility to grace whence goodness spontaneously emanates. ‘Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.’

Goodness which we choose by balancing it against evil has scarcely anything but social value; to the eyes of Him ‘who seeth in secret’ it proceeds from the same motives and is marked by the same vulgarity as evil. Hence the kinship often observed between certain forms of ‘virtue’ and the corresponding sin: theft and the bourgeois respect for property, adultery and a ‘respectable woman’, the savings-bank and waste, etc. Real goodness is not opposed to evil (in order to oppose something directly it is necessary to be on the same level); it transcends and effaces it. ‘What evil violates is not goodness, for goodness is inviolate; only a degraded good can be violated.’

The soul engaged in the pursuit of pure goodness comes up against irreducible contradictions. Contradiction is the criterion of reality. ‘Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it. It is because we ourselves are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.’…Only imaginary good things have no contradiction in them…meet with no obstacles so long as they do not pass on to action; they sail gaily forward in a sea of pure but fictitious goodness; the shock of hitting the rocks is the signal which wakens them. We must accept this contradiction—the sign of our misery and our greatness—in all its bitterness. It is through fully experiencing and suffering from the absurdity as such of this universe where good and evil are mixed that we attain to the pure goodness whose kingdom is not of this world. ‘That action is pure which we can accomplish by keeping our intention totally directed towards pure and impossible goodness, without disguising from ourselves by any lie either the attraction or the impossibility of pure goodness.’ Instead of filling the space which stretches between necessity and goodness with dreams (faith in God as a temporal father, science, progress …) we must receive the two branches of contradiction just as they are and allow ourselves to be torn asunder by their distance. And it is in this tearing, which is as it were a reflection in man of the creative act which rends God, that we rediscover the original identity of necessity and goodness: ‘This world, in so far as it is quite empty of God, is God himself. Necessity, in so far as it is absolutely distinct from goodness, is goodness itself. That is why all consolation in affliction separates us from love and from truth. Therein lies the mystery of mysteries. When we touch it we are secure.’ He, therefore, who refuses to accept confusion is marked for suffering. From Antigone whom the guardian of the temporal city called upon to go and love among the shades, down to Simone Weil herself whom human injustice crucified until she was in her grave, affliction is the lot of all those lovers of the absolute who are astray in this world of relative things: ‘If we want only goodness we are opposed to the law which links good to evil as the illuminated object to the shadow, and, being opposed to the universal law of the world, it is inevitable that we should fall into affliction.’ In so far as the soul is not completely emptied of itself, this thirst for pure goodness leads to the suffering of expiation; in a perfectly innocent soul it produces redemptive suffering: ‘To be innocent is to bear the weight of the whole universe. It is to throw in the counterweight to restore the balance.’ Thus purity does not abolish suffering; on the contrary it deepens it to infinity whilst giving it an eternal meaning: ‘The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural cure for suffering, but a supernatural use of it.’

and further assume they are from the book. I just started it ↩

Cozy

2026-04-26T07:46:42-05:00

I’ve made reference lately in my notes and in conversation to the “capitalist mill” as in “grist for the capitalist mill”¹. I would give specific examples but the symptoms as they concern me are already topics of all the posts: inability to focus, social division, lack of meaningful productivity, everything getting worse, producing things of value long-since devalued, platforms instead of products, content instead of art…

But sure, it’s probably my fault for not meditating more.

Cozy is having a moment and I’ve fallen for it. It strikes me as the foil to the mill. It seeps contentment, simplicity, a disregard for more.

Cozy lit

I’ve been into hopepunk/solarpunk for a while now, but I randomly picked up Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve picked up More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop but read Bright Green Futures and am reading Accelerated Growth Environment from the amazing Shiraki Press first.

Japan

I’ve been obsessed with Japan for a while now, but Morisaki Bookshop led me down a Jinbōchō rabbit-hole. This was my favorite of the YT videos I watched.

Information diet

The indieweb is the best place to find cozy content, see last post’s links. The fact that this blog has returned to its personal roots isn’t intentional, but not an accident either.

Still, calm, reasonable voices discussing news is required, and I’ve found recent episodes of the Vergecast useful.

Tools for the rebellion

slop cop

I just learned that “grist to/for the mill” has a positive connotation – “that everything can be made useful or turned to advantage” – but I’ve never used it that way. Also my name is Miller, so…in theory (historically?) I’m doing the grinding up of here. Not just the grinding. ↩

Sigh

2026-04-25T20:00:20-05:00

I quote-tweeted Cory Doctorow’s Mastodon post linking to his Comrade Trump post. I quoted this part:

Ebikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they’re basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you’ve gotten accustomed to an ebike – maybe you’ve invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you’ll never go back. The advantages of an ebike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favorite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.

Followed by a single word: sigh

Only that word because of post length limits, but anyone following along the last few months would hopefully pick up that it was in reference to:

I haven’t had time to mourn what will be the functional death of what was one of most central aspects of my existence, and the thing that kept me sane amidst [waves hands around]. But I don’t imagine I will be riding a bike in remotely the same way I did.

Bicycling was a central aspect of my life from early high school through college. There was a long period where it took a significant back seat, but I returned to it over a decade ago. It provided exercise, time outside, a kind of built-in meditation, and a way to appreciate my surroundings in a way that most of means of travel cannot. Then I crashed for the first time in many decades, and am unsure if I will ever get to ride in remotely the same way again.

Cory reposted my quote post of his post 😵‍💫 and a bunch of people fav’d or reposted it. Because of the ebike pull-quote. Not because of what is now in my rear-view.

As we headed out of town towards Oklahoma, I saw parts of the city I hadn’t seen in four months. Every road was under construction from Dallas to the Red River. But most surprising was how, from my observing spot in the passenger seat, positional awareness was all based on past bike rides. We’d been on the road for 20-30 minutes already when I pointed out the window and said, “Milo, do you remember when we rode to there? The trail goes around that corner and ends, that’s where we turned around. You bonked on the way back. [A few seconds pass, and the highway intersects with the trail’s end.] Right there! [I point more excitedly.]”

[His mother pointed out that he’s ridden further on his bicycle than most adults.]

This happens almost every car journey. I see a landmark and think, “We’re only here? Riding here is fun. This has been awful and has felt like forever.”

Today my old riding buddy took his son and Milo mountain biking. Milo had so much fun and talked and talked about it after he got home. I’m so grateful for my friend’s time and willingness to take the boys out. I’m so sad to have missed it. [I was at another volleyball tournament, only a 45 minute drive away this time.]

small cypress: on middle schoolers

I really like teaching middle school. They’re really annoying, and never stop talking, and sometimes a little smelly, but it’s fun chaos.

You just have to forgive endlessly and take nothing personally and put your foot down. The big thing is just having unconditional positive regard for them because they are hormonal and miserable and most of them really are trying! And they know when you don’t like them!

So many people who teach MS just quietly kind of hate them and they can tell

I really like teaching middle school. They’re really annoying, and never stop talking, and sometimes a little smelly, but it’s fun chaos.

You just have to forgive endlessly and take nothing personally and put your foot down. The big thing is just having unconditional positive regard for them because they are hormonal and miserable and most of them really are trying! And they know when you don’t like them!

And I am in Baltimore City. They’re not just going to tell a new white teacher they don’t have a relationship with about CPS coming to their house last night, or that they miss so much school in 5th grade to watch the baby, or that yeah it’s on sight with so-and-so because they whisper to them in the halls about their dad being shot last year.

I replied on Mastodon that they were doing the Lord’s Work.

small cypress: ellicott city, md, usa

pleasant walking, lots of cute shit, many plaques, will visit again

I long for old, small, northeastern towns.

The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI

I hate Substack but this one is good. Includes data from a number of studies and Ireland’s recent experiment with permanent basic income for artists which I had heard about but about which was slightly misinformed.

The Marginalian: Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day — now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles — live largely in the open air — am sunburnt and stout, (weigh 190) — keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day…the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish’d — I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?

Tumbling

I think great leaders are people who have been in the tumbler long enough that it shows. There is a smoothness to them that only comes from years of being shaped by difficulty inside real community. They are not rough and jagged. They are not brittle. They hold up well. You can see it in how they handle pressure, how they respond when they are wrong, how they stay present when things get uncomfortable.

🎙️ Mattie On The Homefront

In letter after letter, all book-ended the same way, are my great-grandmother’s entire correspondence to my grandfather during his time in the U.S. Army - from 1942 to 1945.

The letters make up a vivid, nearly daily diary of Mattie’s life back on the homefront. It is the portrait of a family, a community, a place, and a time; all in extensive detail and a casual tone.

I knew that I wanted to share these letters with my dad, to experience discovering them together. So, in each episode of Mattie on the Homefront, we read the letters aloud to each other, moving week-by-week through time and learning about our family.

Listening to strangers read old letters doesn’t sound compelling but it really is.

🎙️ The Harbingers – just a fun fiction podcast.

Volleyball in OK

2026-04-19T21:41:20-05:00

Went to a volleyball tournament Friday-today. I’m too tired to write about it. Here are some photos.

But mostly it was:

That girl is tired.

It's Hard Living in the 21st Century Everything Comes with a Price

2026-04-12T15:20:10-05:00

📺️ Noah Gundersen - Die Young (Official Music Video)

I’ve been a fan of Noah Gundersen for a long time. I like this song and love this video. (The music video is dead, long live the music video.) I searched my archives for previous mentions and I only found two posts where I used his tracks as soundtrack. Both talked of death & grief.

Fast Boy, just a mention of Ezra’s passing.

Week Five, from when I briefly did weeknotes:

Quietly, the week before last, a few days after Christmas, Lucy grew older than Margot was. Before she left us, Margot was walking. Lucy isn’t exactly close, but she’s making progress towards bipedalism. When remembering, there is a certain measure of cognitive dissonance, when the last weeks of Margot’s life are mostly a blur of pain and disbelief; and, well, all weeks with Lucy are so full of joy, laughter and happiness. I recently saw Penn playing with a three year-old and it was impossible not to imagine what it would be like to have Margot still here with us. But we don’t. We do have each other. And the four of us continue forward in a cloud of that grace and we will be grateful for every day it exists.

Our Knowledge Exceeds Our Wisdom

2026-04-10T15:55:22-05:00

📺️ Brian Cox: The terrifying possibility of the Great Filter

So I don’t see any reason in principle why we couldn’t become an interplanetary, interstellar species other than potentially our own stupidity. And I think that probably, it could be one of the reasons why we don’t see any other civilizations around. It could be that our knowledge, our scientific prowess exceeds our wisdom, exceeds our political skill. It could be that once a civilization develops the means to destroy itself in the form, for example, of nuclear weapons or biological weapons or maybe some kind of a lack of control of AI, who knows–it may be that once a civilization acquires that technical know-how, then it goes ahead and destroys itself essentially inexorably because it’s just too difficult politically to run a civilization that has the power to destroy itself. If you look back through our recent history, there’ve been several occasions that we know about, that I know about and you know about, where we came very close to destroying ourselves, or at least setting us back to the Stone Age, basically. The Cuban Missile Crisis, well-documented events in the 1980s, for example, where there could have been nuclear launches and weren’t, and I’m sure there are many others that we don’t know about.

There’s the challenge of climate change. We’re completely incapable of coming together at the moment as a global civilization to address that challenge. That could set our civilization back. Biological weapons, the threat of AI, we seem to be completely incapable of regulating those threats.

So it might just be almost a law of nature. Things like us [chuckles], things that can build an industrial civilization, are just inherently too stupid to get out there to the stars. And I wouldn’t put that past us.

The video title references one of the different hypothesis presented, not the one discussed in the above quote. I just liked the comically nihilistic turns of phrase in that bit. The entire video is well worth the time.