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
February 4. More links. Yesterday John Michael Greer made one of his most important posts yet: Endgame. He looks at the flow of poor people leaving the cities, state governments slashing services, and the federal government desperately laundering its own money, and concludes that we are already in what history will see as a hard crash -- and yet, it will still be slow enough that some people will miss it:
...a decade from now, let's say, when half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the south and the mountain West, those who still have access to cable television will no doubt be able to watch talking heads explain how we're all better off than we were in 2000.
I can't read Sharon Astyk because she sometimes writes more words in a day than I read. She has at least two blogs, one at http://sharonastyk.com/ and a more prolific one at http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/. Also I think she raises kids, grows food, and is secretly seven people. Anyway, I do try to skim her, and a few days ago she made a post of only 4300 words, Peak Oil Is Still a Women's Issue, which quotes and links to a bunch of her other posts. One thing she mentions is that in hard times, women tend to focus on practical things while men become depressed. This is probably because men, more than women, have learned to see the meaning of life in terms of participation in the money economy, so they have more grieving to go through.
Howard Zinn died last week. A reader sends a great piece he wrote in 1999, On Getting Along, seven bits of advice about how to remain happy in such an awful world.
First, don't let "those who have power" intimidate you. No matter how much power they have they cannot prevent you from living your life, speaking your mind, thinking independently, having relationships with people as you like.
Finally, a reader sends another loose end on yesterday's subject, an article from 1987 explaining why extrinsic rewards lower performance, especially in creative tasks.
February 3. A few more thoughts on yesterday's anxiety/autonomy link. One question is: why exactly are kids being more and more controlled? I think it has something to do with ratcheting: For some reason, we humans find it easier to gradually tighten than to gradually loosen. This terrible habit has led to almost every repressive system and violent revolution in history. I don't know what to do about it. Meditation?
The article also mentions that kids are being trained to have extrinsic goals: money, status, material possessions, power over others. In almost any time and place in history, that value system would be foolish. But in the USA from 1950-1985, it actually made sense. Americans had so much power that you could reasonably expect to set and achieve extrinsic goals. Now that the Empire is declining, extrinsic goals are no longer realistic, and we need to shift back to intrinsic goals -- or better yet, intrinsic processes: doing what we find most meaningful, and following it where it leads.
February 3. My essay Beyond Civilized and Primitive is about to be published in an anthology called The Dark Mountain, and if any of you feel like making a donation, they can use the money.
Last night I spent about five hours upgrading the essay from version 1.1 to 1.2. This included a bunch of little changes, and one big change: about a quarter of the way through, there was an awkward transition from the subject of recent human genetic change, to the subject of whether civilization was a fluke, by way of several rambling paragraphs of fringe science and non-western metaphysics. It's all stuff that I still accept, but it made the whole thing less accessible. It felt like a highway detouring over a shaky wooden bridge. So I tore it down and wrote a new bridge that I think makes the whole essay stronger. If you want to compare them, I've temporarily saved the previous version here.
February 2. Bunch o' links, mostly science and math:
The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? Yes. I might say more about this later.
An analysis of why exactly power corrupts: because it isolates people so that they lose their ability to empathize.
The Economist asks, How will we recharge all the electric cars? With present grid capacity, we can't.
Another round of evidence for the benefits of barefoot running.
And I've putting this off for months because it's so controversial, but it's a compelling idea: Simon Baron-Cohen's Assortative Mating Theory. Basically, he thinks autism is caused by nerds breeding. Even if he's wrong about that, he makes a good point about why Americans talk about "gender" instead of "sex":
Presumably, because your sex is determined by your chromosomes. And in the States the ideology is that we shouldn't be determined by anything; we should be able to be anything we choose.
February 1. Since I'm struggling with writing, I've been reading. Over the weekend I read the classic book On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Basically, she interviewed terminally ill hospital patients and wrote about what she observed, and introduced the now-famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. One thing I learned from the book is that if someone is in denial, the worst thing you can do is argue with them. The best way to break denial is to just patiently listen, and if the evidence is against them, they will eventually talk themselves around.
Another thing I learned is that the dying patient is often the most realistic person involved, and it's the doctor or the family who doesn't want to face it. Of course I thought of our own dying civilization. The "patient" is ready to go, while the people who depend on the patient are scrambling around ordering lifesaving procedures that are much too late -- or are blocking those procedures because they want to believe the patient is healthier than ever.
In a few years, when it becomes obvious that energy is declining, the industrial economy is collapsing, and the climate has gone off the rails, there will be a lot of anger, and it will probably be displaced from the people who deserve it and redirected at anyone who can't defend themselves. And there will be a lot of depression -- especially if the antidepressants run out! Most collapsists focus on technical challenges, but the emotional challenges might be more difficult and important.
At the acceptance stage, the dying person peacefully withdraws from the world, while the survivors let go of the dying person and reengage with the world. Here my metaphor breaks down, because the dying person is the world... or the world as we know it. A better metaphor might be birth.
January 30. A few more thoughts on yesterday's subject. A reader mentions how bicyclists have decreased complexity by converting multi-speeds to singlespeeds and fixed gears. That's one dimension, but in other dimensions, bicycles have continued to get more complex: the sophistication of their manufacture, and the number of tools you need to fix them.
Here's a general rule, and I'm going to use Jeff Vail's favorite word, resilient: A technology is resilient to the extent that we can decrease its complexity, or rebuild it after a catastrophic fall in complexity. Where we can do neither, that technology is doomed to keep increasing in complexity until it collapses, never to return. When you think about it that way, it's hard to imagine how we could still have the internet in 100 years, but it's certain that we'll still have metalworking and the wheel.
January 29. Just saw this on Hacker News: The Misanthrope's Guide to the End of the World. I hadn't heard of the author, Venkatesh Rao, or seen his blog, ribbonfarm, but I've added it to my weekly links because he's an amazing thinker. Check out this post on seeing like a cat.
Anyway, in the end-of-the-world post, he coins the term garbage eschatology. I'm guessing that he has never read Joseph Tainter, but has independently come up with the same idea. My condensation:
Garbage eschatology is based on the premise that our technological infrastructure has acquired too much complexity for us to fix. It will kill us not by turning sentient and wanting to kill us, but by stupidly collapsing on top of us, like a gigantic Windows Vista. My view is based on the idea that the entropy of a software system inevitably increases with time, past a point of no-return. Beyond that, we cannot stop it from collapsing under its own weight, and cannot marshal the resources to reverse the aging process either. The best we can do is hide and then emerge from the rubble...
January 27. My brain has been sluggish lately, so until it picks up, my posts will be mostly links. Yesterday John Robb made a nice post about Carroll Quigley's book The Evolution of Civilizations, which predicted American decline and a shift to a decentralized economy almost 50 years ago.
James sends a link to a blog that some of you will like, Veter(A)narchy!
And on one of my favorite subjects, the unintended consequences of technologies, here's a Reddit comment about how light bulbs increased deforestation in Nepal.
January 26. A few stray links. Ugo Bardi notices peak fat, that American obesity has stopped increasing. Now, the reason Americans are so fat, especially poor Americans, is that giant corporations run the government, and big systems get the best efficiency with highly processed food, so they've commanded the government to subsidize highly processed food, so it's cheaper to buy than less processed food, so poor people buy it and have to eat too many calories trying to get all the other nutrients. Bardi speculates that poor Americans are now so poor that they can't even afford junk food. And I'm thinking, if they're not even getting enough calories, then they're going to be dangerously malnourished in everything else, and we're going to see a lot more sickness, which the medical industry will exploit for massive profits -- except that the poor can't pay, and the only way the government can pay is by inflating the currency.
Next, one of the happiest articles I've ever seen: cats improve the lives of prison inmates.
And off the usual subjects, a very smart analysis of why hardcore gamers are afraid of easy mode -- because it undermines their ability to signal their status.
January 25. Last week Dmitry Orlov emerged from a long silence with two posts. On the 17th he wrote a 4000 word analysis of the rising oceans, with this great bit:
Our worst-case scenario is that our worst-case scenario is going to continue getting worse and worse... The success of Noah's mission did not depend on having an accurate estimate of how high the waters would rise, because his ark floated.
Then on the 18th he commented on the comments of other collapsists about community, and I tend to agree: Communities will form effortlessly where they're needed, if they're not being violently suppressed; the reason we see community-building only among the higher classes, is that lower-class communities are either hidden or violently suppressed; and it's much too late for us to organize to change the big systems.
Here's a related comment on Reddit: Brian Boyko on why Americans don't protest, because we understand that it just doesn't work. Try this thought experiment: the simplest reform that would do the most good would be total cancellation of debts. There is plenty of historical precedent, including the Jubilee tradition. It would reboot the economy and go a long way toward equalizing wealth without taxes. Because a majority of Americans are in debt, a majority of us would support it. (I couldn't find any authoritative numbers, but this site estimates that 80% of Americans are in debt, counting just credit cards and house and car loans.) Imagine if 100 million Americans, less than half of those in debt, took to the streets and shut down the whole country, demanding forgiveness of all debts. Would it work? Of course not! Maybe the military would test new high-tech weapons on the crowds, or maybe the elite would take helicopters to their fortified compounds and let the country implode. But the last thing that would happen would be for congress to pass a law canceling all debts. And if they won't make that reform, they certainly won't make a reform less popular, harder to understand, and equally radical, like single-payer health care or a corporate death penalty.
But what will happen is that more and more people will be unable to feed the giant blocks of money, will be cut off from benefits distributed through the giant blocks of money, and will organize to take care of each other.
January 25. Since I mentioned the 2012 movie yesterday, I suppose I'd better clarify my position on the Mayan calendar. I pretty much follow John Major Jenkins: the Maya did have a calendar based on sophisticated astronomy, the winter solstice of 2012 is the end of a 5125 year cycle, but there is no evidence that the Maya predicted a global catastrophe.
I'm also familiar with Terence McKenna's novelty theory. Basically he took the I Ching, ran it through a bunch of mathematical transformations, and came up with a graph that, if you squint your eyes just right, appears to match history, and predicts something big in 2012. I consider it an insult to my intelligence that he used the I Ching. "Oooooo, ancient Chinese wisdom!" I think you could do the same thing with Spider Man comics -- and not because it's all meaningless, but because it's all meaningful: Reality has the structure of a dream, all parts contain the whole, and you can tap into this interconnectedness to produce results that seem magical to materialists, but that are ultimately not that useful. You don't have to know anything about the Mayan calendar to see that big changes are coming in the next few years, and the calendar might even hold you back if you think it's going to do the work for you.
January 24. Yesterday I went to see 2012 at the discount theater. The first action sequence, where John Cusack is driving through the earthquake, is the most amazing and ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Three hours of that would have made it the greatest dumb film of all time. But as it goes on, every action scene is less inspired than the last, until the "climax" finds Cusack underwater tugging at a cable. Also, the more Roland Emmerich moves from things to people, the more he embarrasses himself. But I was very happy to see one of my favorite bits of fringe science, Charles Hapgood's cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis.
January 22. Something I forgot to mention: When I was in Portland, I was invited to an exotic perennial root vegetable tasting, including scorzonera, skirret, oca, jerusalem artichoke, dahlia, yacon, daylily, mashua, and wapato. To me, the wapato tasted like dirty socks, but I loved the raw mashua, because of its spiciness, and the yacon, which is sweet and crunchy like an apple. Neither of those grow in my climate, but my other two favorites do: Jerusalem artichokes, aka sunchokes, are not great, but good enough that everyone should grow them because they're so easy and productive. And the big winner was skirret. The root looks like a bunch of pencil-thin white carrots, and tastes like a carrot but sweeter, and when it's cooked it gets soft like a potato. Eric Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables says that you should not buy seeds, but living plants of a variety that does not have a woody center, and one source is Perennial Pleasures.
January 21. I'm sick of politics, but I might as well cover the big news that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same speech rights as people, and can now spend without limit on political campaigns. First, Erik analyzes the new law, predicting that the best return on investment will be to use the government to drive competitors out of business. But more generally, I'm thinking that buying ads is not the same as buying votes. Have any of you ever had your vote changed by an advertisement? Political ads only work on voters who are passive and not paying attention.
It's funny when lefties, who understand why corporations should not be legal persons, still think of them as ethical persons. A corporation is no more good or evil than a fire or flood. It's simply a machine for making profits. It was human failure to create corporations in the first place, to make ourselves dependent on them, and now, to be fooled by their their ads. But none of these are ethical mistakes, only mistakes of understanding.
January 21. New Naomi Klein essay on how corporate branding has taken over politics. I got the link from this post by John Robb, who connects it to the decline of the nation state: as nation states lose physical power, they will gain power as brands.
Connecting it to yesterday's post, the Democrats are in trouble because they branded themselves as progressives, but the system is too ossified to make any progressive reforms. Meanwhile the Republicans have branded themselves as the party of anger, so now they are getting votes even from angry liberals.
Of course, whatever the branding, the job of both parties is to throw scraps to the people while protecting the giant pool of money that wants to keep growing by lending money that nobody can pay. The people are stronger than the giant pool of money, in that money only exists if we believe in it. But it's stronger than us in that our whole way of life depends on it. But that way of life is already falling apart.
January 20. The big news in American politics is that the Republicans just won a senate race in liberal Massachusetts. Here's an article, Why Martha Lost, arguing that the Democrats have alienated voters by acting like they're entitled to votes, and by ceding populist anger to the right. On Reddit someone made a post, Can we stop referring to Democrats and Republicans as liberal and conservative, and I made the comment: "Democrats = business as usual, Republicans = zombie apocalypse". If the Massachusetts trend continues, it means Americans will vote for anyone who promises to tear the whole rotten system down and start over.
January 19. Here are a couple links that are a bit over my head. Tim Boucher has just written a long, thoughtful, and well-illustrated article on the history of trade, counting systems, and games. And this physics article suggests that in a holographic universe, gravity is created by information.
January 18. A couple weeks ago John set up an archive of this page, for people who want more than what I save in my own archives. I've added the link permanently to the bottom of this page. The reason I edit my archives is not to stop people from reading stuff, but because I want the experience of reading my archives to not be boring.
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.