Dive Trip Sept 2022
Creating Space for Dive lessons
This particular trip starts way back in time. Decisions collide. Choices are made.
The first decision in Jan 2022 was to participate in crypto related work. Not just say teach a class in eth as I’d done in 2017, or say even exploring my own ideas such as at https://sugarhero.world — but rather to actually participate in third party startups, to get seriously involved in crypto. I’ve always monkeyed around with crypto stuff, helped on some smaller things, but I finally figured it was time to play more seriously.
The second decision was that I wanted to join my SF friends, whom I miss terribly, on one of their occasional world adventures. Specifically somewhere tropical, and more specifically one that was being planned for Sept 2022 to go diving in Indonesia.
And perhaps a third decision or goal is that I wanted to explore Bali. The values there seem unusual and interesting to me — I wanted to see it at least once in my life.
Be careful what you wish for.
The first part of my 2022 crypto work goals started off swimmingly; I quickly found myself entangled in exciting projects. I helped build https://starrybot.xyz which started to take off and now has wide adoption. And then I started helping https://codexdf.com — a more sober crypto tax venture, which then also got funded. And then also started to help on a fascinating digital twin project at https://livingcities.xyz (which as well got funded!). I was also taking on a very minor role to advise an NFT project, working with a team in Indonesia of all places. But basically I very quickly had my hands full.
On top of this I also had a personal passion project funded by a small grant, deeply meaningful, deeply rewarding (at https://orbitalweb.github.io) but I had to push it to the edge of my plate, even though it was most dear of all of them to my heart, with a great community as well.
I quickly was starting to feel like I was doing many things badly instead of a few thing well — but navigating stepping back in a half-way graceful way took some time and work itself. Each project had intense deadlines and intense pressures. Even though I was trying to drop projects on the floor as fast as possible, there were still too many people who made it through my filters with their absolutely critical needs.
For example the NFT that I was advising in a light (1 hour a week role) didn’t really need me per-se — and when I told them they needed to work on finding another CTO, the knee-jerk asshole response from one of the executives was to threaten to sue me for giving up / quitting on them! They totally misinterpreted my intent which was to benefit the company.
One other project we managed to eke out was https://future-of.web.app project — but here again I felt like I didn’t honor the work in the way I wanted. My friends said they’d never seen me so busy.
I’d also had a new friendship that I’d been trying to honor, but felt again like I was stumbling, being dragged along instead of actually taking lead. And I ended up not really being able to be present.
Honestly 6 months of grinding hard was having an impact. I could feel it. My mind simply was anxious, everything was a hoop jumping exercise — I’d been entrained around schedules and deliverables and my creativity was turned off. I would wake up anxious, jump straight into daily stand-ups, I would dream about code and work and try puzzle out deliverables. Everything else was fading.
I also felt like I wasn’t even being a good partner. We did manage to go to Davos together (on behalf of the crypto tax firm) and that was hilarious and crazy and another story, but that was about it — we just both were too busy.
The thing was I was forgetting who I was as a person. Like — the why of why I did things. Who was I? What was the point?
Switching Gears
But at last by late August I felt like I’d honored basic obligations to most things, or had dropped things on the floor that I simply couldn’t hold — and was able to focus 100% on a long planned dive expedition (that I’d also failed to give attention to until then).
Because I’d been so incredibly rushed for time, and been so very stressed by work the last 6 months I’d then also struggled to complete the dive e-course — but finally I was ready for in water lessons.
By this time it was very late to be able to do the in-water portion. There was a small window between the end of the month and Burning Man (which had come up as a last minute opportunity as well). It was a lot of work to find an instructor who could help on short notice — and yet I felt like I needed this trip, I needed it badly for some reason. Yet every place I tried in and around Oregon was backlogged months behind! I called further and further down the coast and finally found an available dive-shop in the Laguna Beach area and they set me up. I immediately booked tickets, a hotel, a car.
I ultimately ended up doing the 3 day PADI training, pool time and beach walk in with https://www.instagram.com/sarahundertheseas/ who was excellent, and also strangely had once been Palmer Lucky’s teacher — so she was basically teaching yet another VR nut about diving (perhaps everybody is into VR then?).
Stayed in San Diego the first night, then my brain slowly figured out that Los Angeles is basically touching San Diego, so on the next nights I just drove an hour north and stayed at my friend Bonnie’s house in Beverly Hills and enjoyed evening walks and splashing around in her pool.
Lessons were excellent for opposite reasons. Many small things that could go wrong went wrong, and it was hugely instructive to see recovery strategies and to also see that good habits are essential. It was kind of surprising that (among the many small weird things that went south) that my instructor got bit on the lip and then that swelled, and then she had some trouble equalizing her ear — a good lesson in the many small things that require attention (she was fine later). The beach walk in was a bit rough, especially carrying all the gear; also instructive, strange to breathe through a respirator when pounded by waves. We also lost our anchor, and I managed to lose a weight and could not control buoyancy — all learning experiences.
Overall I felt strangely comfortable under the waves despite scary stories everybody had told me.
Also I made a nice octopus friend.
I also had a chance to visit SpaceX a bit and grab dinner with my friend Taran who works there. And *ALSO* astoundingly managed to spend an evening at the Explorers Club in LA which blew my mind slightly, and made some new possible friends there too.
Aug 28th -> Burmingham
Upon return from dive cert I immediately set about packing for the burn. I’d had our SUV’s windshield scheduled to be fixed and the AC fixed as a prelude to the trip to dovetail with my return. I had a ShiftPod that I half owned with a friend and had scheduled to also intersect us. My son had also arrived from Bend and was kicking around the house waiting for us all to go.
We were just about to head out but weirdly we had a flat tire at the last minute, but found a Jiffy Lube that was able to fix it before closing. We were all finally ready so we basically threw everything in the SUV and left much later than we intended.
Drove the 9 or so hours to Burning Man, arriving at 2am — and curiously at a time with the southern access being blocked due to a car accident that stopped all traffic from that direction — so there was no line up at all for us — in fact there were no flaggers, it felt strangely empty, the whole thing was just a dusty drive to will call and then to the gate where Nova got to do her first gate entry.
I’d stressed a bit about ticketing, since I’d been juggling so many different plans, and I did end up wasting a ticket because I’d bought one extra… but I did end up giving it away to somebody in need.
Rolled into camp and setup the ShiftPod. And once setup we just basically stopped thinking for a week and largely hung out with our friends.
Zeth had (in earlier August) kitted out a box truck with a kitchen and that became our home base. We made industrial quantities of food with the extended crew and feasted like kings. Our own contribution was a man burn night ramen with pork belly that we’d brought on dry ice.
Generally the burn was low key for me, avoiding high-density socializing in order to minimize Covid exposure. But it was wonderful to walk around and look at art, and friends large art projects, and especially nice to bring my son again and Kate and Nova and our extended happy family of misfits. A fairly dusty year. Didn’t hang with many friends but saw a few dear ones.
Our actual contribution/mission was making and offering sushi in a secret sushi camp — which was a ridiculously over the top amplification of what one might imagine normal sushi assembly to be; completely absurd really — had not laughed so hard in a while. I think a secret of Burning Man is to take any ordinary thing to the Burn and try do it with 20 strangers. It really gets out of control.
A friend was doing a drone show so we also caught that — a delight to see up close. (It would be fun to work for them but alas my life is not going in that direction).
Sept 4 Sun -> 4am Burning Man Exodus
We slept a few hours after the man burn and then I pushed our small posse to get out before the general rush by dawn. I tend to hate getting stuck in exodus and I had a tight timeline — so I pushed hard. We had zero wait and were very lucky since apparently the wait grew to 12 hours later in the morning.
Taking the northern exit we had just enough gas to hit a gas station, and then luckily also we found a hot-spring on the way back and soaked there — was a lovely break — and chatted with burners in a post burn euphoria.
Sept 5 Mon -> Pack / Clean / Fly
Once back I pretty much spent the next day unpacking and cleaning and repacking. So much playa dust. Washing the shift pod was hard!
Then I decided to fly out to Jakarta on Wednesday, since house chores were done, and why risk missing out on the dive trip for some unknown mystery reason? In hindsight I probably would have not rushed out — but it was hard to stay in Portland with the reefs calling.
Sept 7 Wed -> Jakarta late arrival
Arriving in Jakarta was curiously mentally challenging for me; unsure why really — I’d flown all over the world, but somehow I just lacked the trust that everything would work out. It felt higher stakes.
In hindsight now I feel like I could navigate this all easily, but there was a strange caution at the time. In any case everything was seamless, and I stayed at a hotel next to the airport uneventfully after clearing customs and paying custom fees and doing the covid requirements and so on (actually I accidentally skipped the covid test line and nobody seemed to notice).
Sept 8 Thu -> Labuan Bajo -> Meruorah Komodo
Stepping off the somewhat older jet with worn seats, and out of the airport, I started to really feel more present; leaving a hoop jumping or planning execution mode, and simply being.
It’s a brief walk from the airport downtown, and the cadence of the streets is written in a kind of easy going construction — half built homes, made of tin, sheltered only somewhat from the weather. There’s a not-quite-indoors way that people live here; it’s already much quieter than Jakarta, and already the pace feels relaxed.
It was especially nice to feel the street life of a place that was not Bali — but in Indonesia, because later on I wanted to be able to contrast it against Bali.
Walked from hotel to hotel, ultimately ending up for better or worse at one of the nicest hotels on the Island — the only thing left with availability. Dropped my gear finally in the early afternoon and got very busy with doing nothing at all.
Sept 9 Fri -> Labuan Bajo -> Meruorah Komodo
Lingered in town this day, simply walking around, de-jetlagging, doing a few work related odds and ends, bought a dive light.
It’s a town in transition. I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it becoming a busy tourist joint a few years down the road. Everywhere there are signs for diving and PADI lessons. Not that many tourists however.
Sept 10 Sat -> Labuan Bajo -> Airbnb Villa
Friends started appearing, very exciting. Ran into Shanee and Pez and Jessica and a ton of other friends who were all going to be on the trip. We all checked into an amazing villa that Jessica had the foresight to rent and spent the evening hanging out and talking and enjoying the ridic pool.
This is the absurdly nice airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/51074024
Sept 11 Sun -> Dive day 1
We transferred gear from the villa to the dive boat and all got aboard. It was a day of firsts for me — going from an utter novice to slightly less of a novice. Hilarious to basically go from a tutorial dive to diving in what may be one of the most beautiful places in the world.
10:00 — Boarding https://www.neomicruise.com/ and underway
15:00 — Check Dive at Sebayur Island down to 30 meters; first deep dive!
19:00 — Night Dive after the sun set with nudi, sweetlips, first night dive!
Sept 12 Mon -> Dive day 2
07:30 — Dive Manta Rays, Giant Trevally, a few sharks
10:30 — Dive Manta Rays in Manta Alley
15:00 — Komodo Dragon visit! Astounding
17:00 — Walking on Pink Beach (Foraminifera); and strange beach sea snakes
18:30 — Night Dive coral and many invertebrate. Move from Manta Alley, eels, nudibranches, spanish dancer
Sept 13 Tue -> Dive day 3
05:00 — Sunrise Hike
10:30 — Dive Batu Bolong — exited with 80 psi
14:00 — Dive Turtle Point — exited with 100 psi
18:30 — Dive Black Water Dive
Sept 14 Wed -> Dive day 4
07:30 — Dive Castle Rock
11:00 — Dive Crystal Rock — exited with 40psi
14:30 — Dive Shotgun!
20:30 —Dive Torch Dive
Sept 15 Thu -> Dive day 5
07:30 Dive Tatawa Besar
11:00 Dive Batu Bolong
17:00 Closing Ceremony — really nice musician, bean bag dinner
Sep 16 Fri -> Step off boat — Villa Eve
Disembarkation.
Hard to communicate the feelings of this part of the experience.
I did feel that the reefs were more like a single responsive organism. Utterly captivating. Entirely unlike land based life. I will write about this more below as the thoughts synthesize together into a larger thesis. Basically by the end of the trip I was seeing a continuity between reef intelligence, gamelan, and the way the Balinese live.
But this last day some kind of inner earache / bacterial infection thing was catching up with me. We’d been diving 3 to 4 times a day and perhaps I’d equalized badly and gotten fluid in. It was ridiculously painful; hard to think and concentrate even — this would knock me out for the next couple of days in fact. Got powerful antibiotics and a strange ear lidocaine of some kind — this all helped quite a bit.
Sep 17 Sat -> Bali
Jumping on that plane to Bali from Komodo I felt strangely torn in the most unusual way. I wanted to simply keep diving forever with my new and closer friendships; to stay floating and never really go back to any duty whatsoever.
It was the same feeling when I wrapped up on the movie I’d worked on for Terry Gilliam — I’d gotten to know him well, and had built close relationships with the whole team, and I just wanted to run away and join that circus — even though everybody else who traveled with that crew was kind of wrecked by that choice; so many broken relationships and drama and so much heart break. This also was a strange and eerie pull on my heart strings as well; like a post burning man crash. Between that heart ache and my ear ache I felt slightly wrecked.
My friend Julie had arranged to meet me and fetch me from the airport and bring me to Danu’s Guest House. Danu grew up in small town Ubud prior to electricity and had worked in the rice fields himself. He was friends with everybody and was a huge resource for me to learn about the culture.
A terrible mistake?
But something that I didn’t appreciate was simply the traffic and navigating traffic in Bali. Arriving in Bali in the evening the noise seemed incredible. The stop and go traffic maddening. Clearly the island was utterly crushed by tourists or the press of humanity. While grimacing through the pain of my ear ache, and missing my friends on the boat in the most unusual way, and jolted by every stop it felt like I’d made a terrible terrible mistake. Maybe Bali was not real; just a media fantasy? The reality was just some kind of grimy busy city?
Sep 18 Mon -> Ubud Bali
Here I was torn. My friend Shanee was texting me to come up to her part of the island and go dive. Clearly that wasn’t going to happen with the ear ache, but also I felt trapped in some kind of inner city nightmare.
But slowly Ubud improved on me.
I woke up to coffee with ginger and sticky sweet rice in a leaf; looking out over a riotous green valley.
And I finally took a chance to walk around by myself, not on a scooter, not in traffic, not in the noise. Not tugged, not dragged, not obligated but free.
I found serene quiet of back streets and corners, with vivid green plants climbing stone temple walls, and vast expanses of rice fields. And I started to see a place very different from places I had been.
There is an art, an animus infused with nature, a spirituality that is intensely present. It genuinely looks like a way of living that somehow blends Hindu culture with indigenous thinking — it is in every building, in every offering. It is a place that still sees the world as magical.
Visiting the Water Temple Museum near Ubud
My formal or at least pretextual goal in Bali was to study Balinese culture, and specifically study the Water Temple systems — it was a core part of a thesis I’d read and part of my thinking around modeling complex systems (see https://simulate.world ). A personal life goal is to build tools to let ordinary people play with future outcomes of their local ecosystems — to simulate the intersection of land use, law and policy.
Stephen Lansing had written about the Balinese Water Temple Societies and how indigenous water management practices had pushed back on technocratic green revolution plans for fertilizers and pesticides. Part of my inquiry into Bali was to try to understand how it was that the people of Bali learned to work together, to think together, to be able to come to such decisions.
Danu had suggested visiting the Subak Museum — and given that he’d worked in rice fields as a child I figured he’d have good input.
It turns out that growing rice is an all encompassing skill; involving water management, ritual, many kinds of life, hydraulics, drilling water caves through deep rocks, and many stages of rice management over many months. There’s a need to work together, the Subak itself emerges out of this.
These fields had struggled to adapt to new ideas from foreigners — and there’s a real struggle between old and new practices:
But there is also learning here that I found uniquely Balinese — the Balinese ability to say ‘no’ — which I’d seen in several other ways. Stephen Lansing speaks to this — that leaders were actually able to re-enfranchise the Subaks — something that seems unusual in my mind.
What surprises me is how Bali values manage to resist change more than once. It seemed like there is something about the place that is different. Is it the rhizomatic biodiversity? Is there something else going on?
There is of course a long history of professors exploring Bali — everybody sees something different — has different experiences:
I think what I learned overall visiting in person was different from what I’d read or heard even from Lansing. I feel like I started to see a trans-human organism; that consisted of villages, many species working together, moving like a wave through time, more like a pattern that exists despite the changing individuals. I also saw a conversation being engaged between many parts; conversations between fish, frogs, crabs, insects, snakes, weeds and primates. It is like Bali itself is the entity, and it wants to thrive, and it recruits everything it can to continue to do so.
Gamelan
Julie, who had fetched me from the airport, is a Phd ethnomusicologist who studies Gamelan. She had come to visit a friend who is an experimental Gamelan musician that is renowned elsewhere in the world (and not so renowned in Bali itself since there is an emphasis on traditional Gamelan).
We had a chance to see them practice at Alit’s beautiful home:
There is a lot of written text on Gamelan. It doesn’t need repeating. But I did see something interesting to me — the water temple practice to ring a large wooden gong did help to organize activities in the rice fields. And there were bullfrogs that made large calling sounds. It seemed like there was an acoustic quality to the landscape as a whole that may have informed the Gamelan itself — in a sense the Gamelan may derive from the local sound scape. I don’t have much evidence to back this, but the thought of these seemingly different concerns being connected intrigues me.
Regardless Gamelan is evidence of indigenous life, an indigenous life that relies on nature, that is connected to nature — perhaps more than we are in our technological civilizations — and as well with a kind of history often obscured in other places around the world. Looking at Gamelan may give us some insight into values, culture, beliefs, relationships of Bali as a whole.
Connected Systems
I started to draw a through line in reverse. I’d started at the reefs, I’d visited the rice paddies and finally visited the musicians, the artists.
First I was seeing unbelievably rich underwater ecosystems that almost seemed like single intelligent entities. Entirely different from anything I’ve ever seen on land. The thousands of fish that we are floating within in a reef all respond instantly to say a shark swimming through, or a change in current. It isn’t so much individual fish as a single organism. It is like being inside a mind and watching thoughts flicker past.
The dead reef systems we saw were on the outputs of extremely strong underwater currents rather than human activity. Reefs are the receiver of all the outputs of terrestrial activity. They are the indicator species.
I didn’t see the extent of any real damage myself but I do understand that these reef systems are hugely impacted by pesticides and fertilizer wastes, including around Bali.
On Bali itself I was seeing the Balinese culture, and how the “conversation” struggled when it encountered the west. The thinkers from industrialized western nations just didn’t appreciate the complexity of the systems.
Ultimately as humans I think we have some kind of axiomatic spirituality — some thing we don’t question perhaps enough. The rhetoric, language, communication, stories drive out our values, and then we coordinate at scale, to produce the outputs that impact the downstream systems.
Reasoning Better at Scale
The question for me is how can we see and think better? Bali is an example in microcosm of what is happening around the world. If we could better appreciate the downstream effects of our decisions (such as the long term implications of the use of pesticides and fertilizers) then we might begin to protect this beautiful planet of ours.
A new direction for me was the thought that our current set of tools may be especially limited, may contribute to our blindness.
In the book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ (which Shanee recommended) David Abram talks about how written language stands on pictorial representation, and that at one point in the past we were more constantly reminded of an embodied world that we live in than we are now.
Better understanding the roots of written language, and perhaps even what is lost in written language, we may regain some power and awareness of the true breadth of our mediums of communication — for example how our communication may be a conversation not just between people but between many different creatures.
As well, an even stronger thesis in ‘The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth’ argues that systems of life themselves are effectively more like group organisms, harvesting energy together. That seeing systems as made up out of individuals is inaccurate. This starts to speak to what we can visibly see with reef ecosystems — where they react as a whole, at once, to stimuli. If the way we see organisms such as reefs today is incomplete, and if that is a function of how we think and reason, then we may want new ways to see , communicate and think.
Every culture has its solutions for its challenges. I do see that in the west we use a particular set of technologies. Some are physical (homes, cars, streets) and some are not (language, ritual, laws, values). It is those less visible technologies that fascinate me. I do see in the west that we especially value tools that improve efficiency and productivity — we may be simply communicating badly, not merely because systems are complex, but because our languages are starved.
I see our art itself as one of these tools as well. For us critical art inquiry is commonly invoked as a tool in conversation — we poke holes in ideas, make fun of things, hold up two ideas next to each other for their hypocrisy. But ritual art for us, that reminds us of our relationships to each other and nature seems to be less common — there seems less of a romantic view or a spiritual view. We don’t seem to give nature a voice.
As a programmer I hadn’t thought too much about how the grammars, the ways of thinking do themselves impose their own goals on me. I may critique a software language for its clumsiness but that was about it. I rarely thought about the physical way that work is performed as a programmer, often solitary, often in a very controlled environment. I had (at best for example) thought how nice it would be to have a field research van, to drive to a place, to work in that place, and to see if being in a place had any effect on where I placed any particular emphasis in my work. I have seen that when I am in a place (such as hiking) that the kinds of projects I think are important are different from when I am back at home. And I have seen that being able to somehow hold onto ideas, bring them back home, and to keep working on them would be special. But I find ideas that seem so important to me when I am on a hike fade in value once home — my priorities shift.
What is more clear to me here was that maybe our technologies themselves could be hybridized. We seem to live more separated from nature — in many ways. To live half outside for example, not always inside, or to live closer to nature. And maybe part of that home is our language itself, the way we communicate. Perhaps this can somehow infused with more of a connection to the real world?
If for example we move towards visual grammars, or augmented reality, where the real world is decorated with virtual information — can that start to connect us to places better? What if we could work in place, visually, connecting virtual objects to real objects? For example to mark up plants, flowers buildings with what we know about them, to share that with the people around us, and have a shared collective understanding of our landscapes. This is part of why I was so interested in the digital twin project; I was interested in bringing the virtual and the real together.
Also what I did see was that the way nature writes code is very different from us as humans. Nature is all about resilience, fallbacks, lots of strategies in reserve. And we as humans are all about raking in as many rewards as possible as fast as possible. We have a tendency to over optimize and our systems have a tendency to fall over.
I’m now given to understand that this is not just because of our simple minds, but because the tools we use to think are divorced from a more complex messy and entangled reality. We could think in a more resilient way if we had languages and tools that resonated more, touched on, and reminded us of living organic systems more.
