misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
January 9, late. I'm done with the Olympia events and heading down to Portland tomorrow. At my talk Thursday, and at the Awakening the Dreamer symposium today, I kept noticing one issue: When affluent Americans ask "what can I do", they mean, "What can I do to save the whole world? What can I do to turn industrial capitalism around in its tracks, to halt species extinction and reverse arctic melting, to feed all the starving people without further increasing the population, to transform human consciousness and witness a global utopia in my lifetime?"
My answer is, you can't do shit. And I'm a woo-woo optimist. I think that beneath all events is an invisible Flow that is intelligent and loving. I think that any human system that goes out of balance with human nature, or with other life on Earth, is doomed to fail. I think that in all possible futures, dandelions will grow through ruined Wal-Mart parking lots. But within this optimism, I see room for epic catastrophes. And some catastrophes are now so far along that "what can I do to stop it" is the wrong question, and the right question is "what can I do to survive it, to help others survive it, to minimize suffering and prepare for recovery?"
Find a landbase and build the topsoil; plant fruit trees and vegetable gardens; learn to forage and hunt and repair stuff; learn uncommon useful skills; make local friends; work to make your city and region more sustainable and resilient; make friends in other regions in case you have to move; gradually shift more of your activities and dependencies out of the money economy; break your addictions; get healthy; spend your money on tools and skills and long-keeping food; meditate; exercise your intuition. This is not meant to be a complete list, but a list of examples of the kind of thing you should be doing. The title of my talk was "Weeds through Pavement", because when pavement turns to forest, the pavement does not turn green and put down roots -- plants crack the pavement and grow through it. So do that.
January 6, late. More new year/decade pieces: Kunstler's 2010 forecast, and from last month, Dmitry Orlov's predictions for the decade, focusing on the concept of autophagy. I have to admit, when I wrote Civilization Will Eat Itself, that's not what I had in mind -- I just got lucky.
And here's Eskil Steenberg on decades, reminding us that decades are defined by events, not numbers. I think we can all agree that the cultural line between the 1950's and the 1960's was the JFK assassination in 1963, and the 1990's ended on 9/11/01. Steenberg thinks the 2000's ended in the fall of 2008, maybe because of the financial crash or the election of Obama. I think it's going to take more than that.
January 5. Busy week. Today I'm driving across the state, then I'll be spending Wednesday with family, and going down to Olympia on Thursday to lead a discussion on the possibilities for complex society after industrial civilization.
January 4. Here's a remarkable reader project, the illuminated thread. Brett is between the second and third stages of a giant bike ride all over the country, on which he makes videos, records himself whistling in water towers, does parkour in ruins, and repeatedly gets in trouble with the authorities for photographing active and abandoned industrial sites. There are some nice thoughts in the Q and A section, and he needs to raise more money for stage three.
Next, go check out Jeff Vail. Just today he posted his 2010 predictions, in which the big systems will commit to a pattern of making very expensive patches for various problems, instead of making fundamental changes, thus guaranteeing a long and bumpy collapse. And back on December 28 he made a post rethinking the precise way that the different nodes would be connected in a "rhizomatic" or "diagonal" economy.
Finally, Anne has more info on yesterday's thatching link:
Research into good thatching wheat varieties continued into the fifties and sixties. Of the last good developments, Maris Widgeon and Maris Hunter are still available commercially -- I bought a few grams of Maris Widgeon seed from Bountiful Gardens and replanted out to a fairly good-sized patch. KUSA seeds might also have something. The chokepoint for thatching isn't a good wheat varietal, its finding a reaper-binder that can harvest the field without crushing the stalks (ruining the waterproofing ability of the resulting roof).
January 3. I'll write something about the new decade after I see what other people are writing. Here are a bunch of unrelated links, mostly good news:
After 20 years, the sea lions have mysteriously vanished from San Francisco's pier 39. Obvious joke: "So long and thanks for all the fish."
Baker/thatcher brings back ancient grains that can be used for both baking and thatching. Remember that grains aren't fit for human consumption unless they've been sprouted or fermented.
A nice article on the toilet revolution, focusing on the value of urine. For the value of poop, read the humanure handbook.
Norway stops MRSA by using isolation and careful attention instead of throwing antibiotics at it like everyone else. (Thanks Kevin.)
And finally, yet another inspiring article about someone living with no money, in this case a young woman squatting and scavenging in London.
January 1. Today I finally made it to see Avatar. Some questions: 1) Why do the men have nipples but not the women? 2) Why does the best ever Hollywood film about Indians have to pretend to be about aliens? 3) Why does fictional entertainment keep getting better while politics and news keep getting worse? 4) How weird is it that Europeans came to North America, exterminated almost all the native people, consumed all the resources for money, and then made a movie about it, taking the side of the natives? I guess it's true what they say: you are what you eat.
January 1, 2010. New policy for the new year. I will no longer answer hard thinking questions over email. Lately I've been swamped with them and it's beginning to get stressful and exhausting. You're still welcome to ask non-thinking questions, and to contribute your own deep thoughts, but if you'd "love to hear what I think", you might be out of luck. If you're not sure what category your question is in, you can always ask it and find out.
December 31. I've had loads of free time over the last three weeks -- there were days when I started writing a post when I got up, and didn't finish until it was getting dark. That luxury is now coming to an end as I get ready for a busy January, so posts will not be as long or deep. Today, some links:
A couple readers tipped me off that this slashdot post just linked to my readings section, specifically Man of the Future, a Loren Eiseley chapter about an extinct hominid with a giant brain. The book it comes from has been in print for fifty years, and yet the Boskop people have now become famous overnight because of this article, What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?
Only one day after Discover posted that, NPR posted this, which similarly challenges our myth of progress: Sustainable Aliens: A New Theory On Why E.T. Hasn't Arrived. But again, the idea is not that new. Back in 2007 the Archdruid wrote this, in Solving Fermi's Paradox:
If unlimited technological progress is possible, then there should be clear evidence of technologically advanced species in the cosmos; there is no such evidence; therefore unlimited technological progress is impossible.
And back in 2005, I wrote the same thing in the "Intelligent Life in Space" section of The Critique of Civilization Changes Everything (scroll down two thirds). Please tell me I wasn't the first person to think of it, because it's so obvious! Although it might not be true. Here's a PDF article by Jacques Vallee, Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness, speculating that aliens are trying to contact us, but they are so different from us that we dismiss their communications as too strange to be "real".
Finally, I have to throw this in because of the date, an article about how the decade never had a name.
December 30. More philosophy! Yesterday, completely by accident, I ended up writing about the definition of "real", and a culture without the verb "to be", in the same post. This morning I finally put the pieces together:
It's silly to define "real" as "shared". A more shared world is more shared, but there's no need to say it's more real, and that's often not what we mean when we use the word "real". For example, most of us would say that a rock is more real than World of Warcraft.
Suppose there is no non-circular definition of "real". Of course, you're free to tack on any definition you want, and people do this all the time without thinking about it. If you take a step back from language, "real" is a tool we use to favor or exclude certain experiences, ideas, or directions of inquiry. We apply "authentic" and "inauthentic", "real" and "fake", "true" and "false" for all kinds of reasons, and what we're saying is "You shall respect this or disrespect it. You shall take this path or avoid it. You shall integrate this into your mental models or ignore it."
The adjective "real", like the verb "to be", is a shortcut, making language more efficient at the expense of understanding. I don't know if there are any cultures without the concept of "real", but I would very much like to live in one, because everyone in that culture would have to be more intellectually rigorous than anyone in this culture.
For example, we could no longer reject Nozick's experience machine for being less authentic. But we could reject it for being less shared: we would prefer to live in a world with other people than to be alone. We could reject it because it's nested within this world, when we would prefer to explore the world in which this world is nested. We could reject it because we don't want to get everything we ask for -- if you've ever played a video game with a good cheat mode, you know that omnipotence gets boring in ten minutes.
Yesterday I said that our whole civilization is an artificial world. If I'm not allowed to say that, I have to think harder, and say something like this: the path of civilization (as we know it) has been to impose our will upon our environment, instead of working with it on equal terms. This has severed our connections to the wider world that we came from, and crippled our understanding of it. More and more of our relations are with a maladapted and unsustainable sub-world, and we are now so deep in it that any other way of living seems impossible.
This leads to a practical question from Andy: "How do you have a shared experience in a world where people are either hypnotized by consumer culture or pre-occupied with their own physical and/or emotional survival?" Or, how do you climb out of a world by making connections, if everyone around you is even deeper in that world? One answer is to connect to something other than humans: spend an hour watching the clouds or examining a tree. Another answer is, sometimes you get out by going deeper in, by meditating or reading books or even playing video games -- but you have to choose them carefully. Any sub-world must justify itself in terms of a world that contains it. Or, if you go into a dungeon, you'd better bring out a treasure.
December 29. On a tangent to yesterday's post, Jeff mentions philosopher Robert Nozick's "experience machine":
If you were given the opportunity to hook up to a machine that would be guaranteed to let you experience absolutely anything you could ask for, and that would be completely indistinguishable from the real experience, but you had to commit to it for life, would you do it? In other words, if the only difference between reality and the machine is the abstract notion that one is "authentic," does that authenticity have value on its own?
I can think of two answers. The first is: We already did it! Civilization, compared to the ways of other human cultures and other species, is an artificial world in which we are gods. And we're pretty much all stuck in it for life. A more challenging answer, to both the first answer and to the original question, is: Give me a non-circular definition of "authentic".
A careful definition would require a book-length exploration of the deepest mysteries of matter and mind. But I can make a pretty good definition with only one word: shared. If you're not a solipsist, if you think reality has other participants, then the more participants there are in a world, or the more widely shared it is, the more "real" we say it is.
The other day Chris sent something related to all this, a long 2001 interview between Derrick Jensen and Martín Prechtel, an American Indian who became a Mayan shaman. There are some bits in here that I think are bullshit, but there's also some really great stuff about the failure of western metaphysics, the invisible debts of technology, and how some languages don't have the verb to be:
In a culture with the verb to be, one is always concerned with identity. To determine who you are, you must also determine who you are not. In a culture based on belonging, however, you must bond with others. You are defined by where you stand and whom you stand with. The verb to be also reduces a language, taking away its adornment and beauty. But the language becomes more efficient. The verb to be is very efficient. It allows you to build things.
December 26-28. Continuing on technologically enduced enlightenment, readers suggest shortcuts: The hemi-sync process claims to alter brainwaves by putting certain sounds through headphones. And a stroke leads a brain scientist to a new spirituality by disabling her left brain in just the right way, something that might be reproducible with surgery. And here's an article about the business of cognitive enhancement.
My position on this issue is best expressed by this Tom Waits quote about music:
If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays.
Suppose you're a rock climber and someone says, "Why go to all that trouble? Here's a ladder." Or: Why bother solving a crossword puzzle when you can just look up the answer? Why ride a bicycle across the continent when you can just get on a plane? Why learn to make something with your own hands when you can just buy one made by somebody else? It comes down to the meaning of life. If you're here to accomplish things, then you might as well just sit in a box pushing buttons. If you're here to explore and learn, then the long road might be more valuable than the short road. And if you're here to have a good time, then what are you doing on such an awful road that you're in a hurry to get to the end?
Another issue is how and when technologies make us weaker. One thing we can ask, when considering a tool, is whether it focuses our native strength, like a knife or a pencil or a biofeedback machine, or whether it does the work for us, like an engine or a calculator or a wire in your brain. Generally, machines that do physical work make us physically weaker, and machines that do mental work make us mentally weaker... so what's going to happen when machines do spiritual work?
A more profound question is: "Does the presence of this thing make me stronger in its absence?" That's what a good teacher does, and oddly, it's what a crutch does, completely unlike a metaphorical "crutch". If your leg is broken, a crutch lets you walk around and keep the rest of your body in shape until the leg heals. And if you're building a permaculture seed community to survive the collapse of industrial civilization, you can use a truck or a backhoe to strengthen your position for a world without engines. It might also happen that a technology makes individuals stronger in its absence, but makes the whole human species weaker in its absence, like vaccinations, which give each person immunity but prevent us from adapting to diseases on the level of genetics or culture.
What if a technology makes us stronger in its presence and weaker in its absence, and we go ahead and use it anyway? Then we are making a lifelong alliance with that technology, and that means both our individual lives and the life of the human species. In either context, if we ever break the alliance and give up or lose the technology, then we will have to pay back all the benefits. Our primitive ancestors made alliances with fire, stone tools, and clothing. Our more recent ancestors did it with metal tools, grain farming, machinery, electricity, the automobile, and most ominously, economic growth. In our own lifetime we've become dependent on computers -- although some uses of computers do make us stronger in their absence, like sharing information about biosand filters and rocket mass heaters.
I don't think our permanent alliances are limited to the ones we made tens of thousands of years ago. But it's going to be interesting to see which modern technologies can break free of their debts to the extractive economy.
December 23-24. A few tech links: Last week Jeff Vail did a short post on nuclear energy and hierarchy. Some greenies have been coming out in favor of nuclear power, because it can enable us to maintain our ridiculous high-energy lifestyle without pumping out carbon and destabilizing the climate. But Vail makes the same point that Ivan Illich made years ago: nuclear power, in its present form, requires an extremely expensive central plant which produces a massive amount of energy. This makes it an ally of a large centrally controlled system. If, on the other hand, everyone generates their own energy at home, with some surplus to give to friends, then we can have a decentralized, autonomous, bottom-up system. I'm not going to speculate on which energy techs would do this best, but it will be interesting to see what people come up with.
Here's the same idea applied to biotech, a video from a few months ago where Michael Pollan advocates open source genetic engineering. I have mixed thoughts on this. Biotech will always be dangerous -- check out Klebsiella planticola. But if everyone is doing it in their garage, at least it won't be evil.
Finally, something I learned about a few years ago through Anna Wise's book The High Performance Mind. There are great subtle benefits to getting your mind in a meditative state, but it's extremely difficult -- you might practice for thousands of hours over many years before you get it right. Back in the 1970's, a scientist named Max Cade discovered how different human mental states correlate with different frequencies of brainwaves, and he invented a biofeedback device called the Mind Mirror. The idea is, it shows you the levels of the key frequencies in real time, so you can learn much more quickly to move between different mental states. More than 30 years later, the Mind Mirror still costs thousands of dollars, but I found this: the OpenEEG project, and here's a photo gallery of a homemade model. Adam comments:
I've done a bunch of research on the Mind Mirror and OpenEEG over the past several years, including interviewing one of the original MM engineers. I looked into building a cheap EEG system... however, it's on the edge of being commercially viable, and I came to the conclusion that if I waited a few years, the technology would catch up and let me focus on software instead of hardware.
Recently Emotiv dropped its prices a lot. $1250 gets you a developer headset and a software development kit that gives you raw access to EEG data. The protocols are closed, so you can't write open source software for it, and it doesn't use active electrodes, so you have to use saline dampened pads. But it has 16 channels, so it has a lot more detail.
There's also this one from Brainquiry. It uses active electrodes and has open protocols for accessing raw EEG data. To make a Mind Mirror, all you really need is the 2 channel model. I am thinking that in another year or so, I will either get the Brainquiry, or there will be another low-cost EEG. We should see inexpensive, multi-active-electrode, open EEG headsets in the next few years from other manufacturers.
The problem I had with OpenEEG is that it isn't wireless -- and I didn't want to hook my brain up to a hand-built system that is connected to 115V power.