Sand mandalas and the American imperium
Formcast Buddha and John the Gargoyle discuss the meanings of 'dissolution'
Welcome, new readers
Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.
Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.
Précis
On our house there is a back porch, which (as discussed in more than one earlier SFIO! essay), each year, with varying amounts of help from me, Dear Wife transforms into a paradisiacal garden bower. In that porch garden are statuary. As a rule, these seemingly inanimate statues are quite taciturn. Nevertheless we have gotten to know some of them.
Recently Formcast Buddha and John de Gargoyle have been talking about disintegration and disunion. They started out talking about the possible disunion of these United States, but, as is usually the case with these two, their conversation soon ranged further afield, and soon included other concepts that begin with the sound ‘diss’: dissolution, dysphoria, dismissal, distribution; destruction, dystopia. . .
Eventually Nymphette Betty swung by. As usual she didn’t have much to say; she just kicked up her leg fetchingly that way she does and waited for the inevitable reaction.
This post is a report on their colloquy, with some commentary be me.
All things must pass, innit?
Normally I try not to eavesdrop when our back porch graven idols are having a conversation. But it’s only early spring, the plants aren’t back yet, and other than the sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, robins, blue jays, flickers, downy woodpeckers, red wing blackbirds, titmice, goddamned starlings and grackles (and a dozen or so less-frequent varieties of visitors) at the twin suet-cake stand, there’s not much happing out there to distract me, so sometimes if I happen to be out on the porch — if, for example, I’m putting more cakes out for the birds — I can’t help overhearing them.
A recent conversation started out something like this:
John de Gargoyle: Nice day if it don't rain. Formcast Buddha: Gargoyle: [Foghorn Leghorn voice] I say, I say, Nice day if it don't rain, wouldn't you say so? Formcast: John de G: OK, I'll skip the pleasantries. Your preference for silence is noted. But I was just trying to be friendly, y'know. Anyway I've been thinking about something and I would welcome any insights you might care to offer. Formcast: OM. John de G: You Buddhist guys are all about impermanence, right? Things fall apart and all that? You spend days making intricate paintings with brightly colored sand, then destroy them so you won't get attached. Well, I've been thinking about how maybe the United States of America is about to disintegrate. I mean, literally, like the Soviet Union. Like the Beatles. Like, I dunno, The marriage of Cher and Greg Allman. One day here, next day gone. Poof. Like Ozymandius, if you catch my drift. You got any opinion on that? Formcast: Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐ John de G: Well, howdy do! Another country heard from! [sotto voce] I've had more interesting conversations with a can of green beans. Formcast: OM.
Back porch Hofstadter/Dennett flashover flashback
Unless you’re one of those rare birds with an advanced degree in Sundman figures it out! studies, you might not recall that the bucolic bower that Dear Wife re-creates each year on the back porch attached to our falling-down house, in all its majesty and spiritual significance (plants, prayer flags and gargoyles, etc), was introduced to the world in my three-part essay A Scared Firefighter up in the Bucket, which, while ostensibly being about the only time I ever got scared during firefighting operations in my ten-year career as a Tisbury, MA, firefighter, actually was as much about my encounters with the cognitive scientist and AI pioneer Douglas Hofstadter and the late ‘philosopher of mind’ Daniel Dennett; and theories of selves and metafiction; and Jefferson Airplane’s song Crown of Creation as it was about going up in the bucket of Tisbury 651 at two o’clock one cold October morning as the flames roared out of all windows of the house below and a live electric wire arc’d on the ground not far at all from our ungrounded tower.
So if you would like to see some lovely photos of the back porch garden in peak season (including a couple pictures of John de Gargoyle before his disintegration began in earnest), or read about firefighting or philosophies of mind and several varieties of AI-engendered existential dread, here again is that link to the first essay in the Scared Firefighter up in the Bucket series. (Some of the best garden photos are in part 2 and part 3.)
John de Gargoyle speculates on the U.S. Constitution’s viability
It occurs to me that some readers may be skeptical that I actually am able to understand conversations between garden statuettes, but surely you’re aware of Google’s DolphinGemma project to use AI to decode conversations among dolphins. So think about it OK? Since I’m under a non-disclosure agreement with a very large Silicon Valley tech company I can’t say much more. But ‘StatuaryGemma.’ Just say’n.
Formcast Buddha: Om John de Gargoyle: Now, as I was saying, about dissolution and disintegration of the USA. With the way the Musk/Trump regime and the Roberts/Alito/OpusDei Supreme Court have declared the Constitution of the USA to be a dead letter, I really don't see how we can go back to the way things were before, even if we do somehow survive the current mess. Formcast: mess John de G: Even if there's a miraculous return to some kind of normalcy — whatever the fuck that means — the climate crisis ain't going nowhere. So why should the 60 million people living in California and New York be content with having just 4 senators, while the combined 8 million people of North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and Idaho get 12 when those people don't even acknowledge that there even IS a climate crisis? The rural, MAGA, states, who voted overwhelmingly for Trump and fascism, are absurdly overrepresented under this setup. Formcast: setup. John de G: Why should the people born in the 21s century feel that they must helplessly let their world burn because some cats in 1789 came up with a plan that these very same MAGA people have declared has no meaning? Formcast: Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐ John de G: Citizens United was designed to turn our country into a plutocracy, and it's working! Formcast: whatever the fuck that means John de G: Sundman was right! We're living in Peter Thiel's game of Thrones, for fuck's sake! Goddamn paleo-Christian TESCREAL vampires. Now you've got JD Vance killing the pope! Formcast: Om John de G: Don't even get me started on Marc Andressen and that 'corporate sovereign city state' bullshit! Formcast: for fuck's sake
The ‘corporate sovereign city’ and other forms of dismemberment of the social compact
I’m not going to belabor the ongoing Trump/Musk/Republican dismemberment of the USian scientific establishment because it gets me too depressed and agitated. But I will come back to it soon as I continue to get myself organized for the upcoming (May 5-8, 2025) Global Synthetic Biology Conference, which I wrote about here, and I hope you’ll read this essay if you haven’t already done so:
Perhaps you’ve read one of my essays about Peter Thiel & JD Vance and the emergent technofascist/christofascist alliance, or about the strong whiff of Nazi-like eugenics emanating from logical Silicon Valley, or about Robert Kennedy as the new Lysenko, and if you have, perhaps you hold me a bid responsible for that gnawing dread that keeps you up nights. But you really don’t know what dread feels like until you’ve read Naomi Klein and Astrid Taylor’s article The Rise of End-Times Fascism: The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Here’s the intro, somewhat condensed by me:
The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.
Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs[. . .]
Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.
The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands.
[. . .]
Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
And while you’re at it check out “TheoBros” Are Building a Tech Utopia in Appalachia — what could go wrong? Kiera Butler’s new article in Mother Jones:
But the Highland Rim Project is not just another old-fashioned utopian fantasy. Rather, it is deliberately forward-looking, infused with Silicon Valley techno-libertarian values. The communities will be designed around “digital self-governance” including cryptocurrency and a culture “in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”
Yes, I know, this all sounds like standard-issue cyberpunk stuff, warmed over William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Black Mirror. But it’s a lot closer to reality than you might think
Formcast Buddha: Om John de Gargoyle: I'm telling you, Formcast, these guys are actively working to dismantle the U.S. of A. and they know what they're doing. Formcast: Om. John de G: That's all you've got to say? 'Om, Om, Om'? What the actual fuck, Formcast, does nothing matter to you? Is everything just 'this too shall pass'? Formcast: Om John de G: OK, I'm sorry, that was a bit harsh. Formcast: Om John de G: But. . . Formcast: But what? You want to know what's disintegrating? You are. The rate you're going, come Memorial Day you'll be nothing but a pile of limestone crumbs. John de G: Well. Talk about 'harsh'. Formcast: Trump is not out to destroy the global economic order. He is an age impaired, deranged, megalomaniac doing random deranged megalomaniacal shit. That we put such a person in charge is, absolutely, complete justification for the rest of the word to declare an end of the American era. John de G: Well, now we're starting to get somewhere.
If not for friction it might look something like this
For a fascinating exploration of what the USA might look like if it were deliberately split up into new, smaller nation-states I recommend Richard Careaga’s Refounding America series. The question, of course, is how to get from here to there without a world war. Friction. That’s the tricky part.
If you have any thoughts or questions that you would like me to bring to my back porch friends, please leave a comment.
Cheerio!
P.S. Since sending this essay out as email I’ve made a few edits — fixing typos, adding links and two images, and moving the discussion of Richard Careaga’s Refounding America project from a footnote into the text proper.