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 18. Thanks everyone who has emailed suggestions about the forums. I've read several from people who have stopped going there, one from someone whose only complaint is that not enough people go there, and one with an interesting suggestion to start a subreddit. The most perceptive email was from Nick:
I sense in your writing that you have lost your inspiration to write and to be public... that you are feeling almost burdened by this inertia you have as a blogger and virtual leader and philosopher. So many people turn to you for your ideas, your advice, etc. At this point, it seems to me that your heart is not in it. If that's true, you should consider moving on.
That's close. I really do still enjoy casual blogging and I expect to continue as long as the internet is up. But on the subjects of the critique of, collapse of, and escape from civilization as we know it, I've already said almost everything that I'll ever have to say. More and more of what I write on those subjects is just a rehash of stuff I wrote years ago. People email me with questions that they could find answered in the essays and archives, or send me links without checking to see if I've already posted them. More and more of the work I do is not to satisfy people's need for clear thinking and fresh perspectives, but their need for community. I understand that we live in a lonely culture. But community is 1) not something I specialize in, 2) not something you should seek in a social structure centered around one individual, and 3) not a need you should satisfy on the internet, although the internet is a valuable tool to locate people for face-to-face communities.
As for the forums, there's only one solution that doesn't increase my workload or make any enemies, and I've done it. I've retitled the "forums" link on this page to "communities", and instead of going straight to the Yuku.com board, it now goes to this intermediate page, which makes it clear that I take no responsibility for any community based on my writing -- although I remain cursed with administrator power over the Yuku board, so if you want to become a moderator, I'll have to figure out how to do that for you. Several people have suggested ways that I could start better forums. If anyone is really that interested, please start it yourself! And I will happily link to it.
February 17. So I've heard that the forums are getting worse. I haven't looked at them myself in months -- it's just too stressful for me to go there. It's like being the rat who hits a lever and sometimes gets food and sometimes gets an electric shock. I even dread the orange envelope on Reddit, but it's worse when I'm the center of attention.
Maybe I should never have let the forums get started, or should have made it clear that they were unofficial and that I did not endorse them. So what do I do now? It is not an option for me to spend several hours a day being a careful and conscientious moderator, resolving conflicts by therapy and community-building instead of by banning. I just don't have nearly that much time or energy. Here are some options:
1) Find some sucker who will commit to doing the extremely difficult job of making the forums a nice place in a nice way. But I think anyone with those skills and that much time could find a better way to use them.
2) Go in there myself with an iron fist, just banning and deleting anything I don't like. But I'd rather not make enemies or have a reputation as that kind of person. Also, banning and deleting are forms of attention, and therefore they are incentives for people seeking attention to continue the same behavior, so I could get sucked into an endless game of whack-a-mole.
3) Completely disown the forums and remove the link from this page.
4) Start a new forum site, with membership by invitation only. And then in a few years, when that one inevitably goes bad, start another, and so on.
5) Continue to ignore the whole issue.
February 17. Just had some kind of 24 hour stomach flu. The symptoms were intense nausea, so that I couldn't sleep or eat, plus weakness and chills. Also it was very difficult to think or read. It was like forced meditation practice, where all I could do was feel my body and listen to my breath hour after hour. And I wonder: if we all took one day out of the month to do nothing but focus on our body and breathing, maybe we wouldn't get sick as often.
February 16. This is a three year old article about scientific research that's been going on for decades, so why is it so little known? Being skinny or fat is mostly genetic:
The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples' weights might be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition.
This explains why I sometimes have episodes of intense overheating in the middle of the night, and why they seem to be connected to eating cheese: cheese is a dense source of calories, and my body burns off extra calories to keep me skinny. Last night I ate half a pecan pie, and I slept terribly and woke up with an overwhelming urge to go for a run. Trying to be fat would make me sick, and at the other extreme, if people are genetically fat, trying to be thin makes them sick.
Of course, 70% is 30% short of 100%, and Americans have become much fatter in the last 30 years without any genetic changes. I'm guessing it's because of highly processed carbs that have calories but no other nutrients, so everybody with a "normal" diet has to massively overeat to not be malnourished.
February 16. Reddit IAmA post from someone born into the British aristocracy. What I find most interesting is the similarity between the people in the center of civilization and the people at the fringes: they have contempt for money, and operate by a gift economy as much as possible.
February 15. Yesterday I shamed myself into finally revamping my
links page. It still needs work, but at least now it's adequate.
Also, Autonomy Acres is a nice new blog, mostly about peak oil and urban homesteading.
And my friend Adam Feuer just started a blog last week. The other day he commented on my posts about Google Buzz, and today he goes into more detail on the autonomous teamwork training program.
February 14. Ah, Valentine's Day, the one day of the year when I'm glad I'm single. I might start writing about personal stuff on Sundays. It occurred to me yesterday that I haven't updated my links or books pages in years, and yet I'm constantly updating my favorite songs page. Lately music just seems more real to me than ideas.
February 13. A reader comments on yesterday's subject:
I think I can explain why some people instinctively have a negative reaction to Buzz and other 24/7 "social media" services. How much privacy a person has, is often an indication of what position they hold in a hierarchy. Who gets the corner office? Who gets a desk in the middle of an open area? Who gets nothing like any of that? Who will spend most of their work hours on some kind of service counter, right out in the middle of everyone? What do they do with new army recruits? Boarding school students? Cult members? They even sleep together in big open dorms, right?
Where is Dick Cheney? Did anyone ever really know? Is it really only for "security" that we let the Queen have her own rail car? Who is allowed to even say "hi" to her? All the way down to the homeless, forced to eat, sleep, piss, and shit right out in public view, all the time.
Now, what does all of this constant twittering and face-booking and beeping and cell-phoning teach the generations who are growing up accepting that they must always be available, to 100 different people and organizations all at the same time? It has nearly nothing to do with efficiency or profit or anything except making sure that everyone knows their place.
February 13. Two links I was going to post yesterday before the Buzz came up. The Archdruid explains why and how the USA is becoming a third world country.
And on the Oil Drum, Nate Hagens explains Medical Dark Matter, with a detailed argument and many charts to make a simple point: "healthcare causes only about 3% of health variation", and the rest is caused by social factors. For more on this subject, I recommend the book The Health of Nations by Leonard Sagan.
February 12. One more note on the below. Of course nobody is trying to track me down. My personal issue with Buzz is my issue with most of this civilization: I feel myself being dragged out to sea in a rip current of increasing complexity. It seems like every product is constantly adding features that I don't want, and that make it harder to use and harder to maintain.
February 12. Google's motto is "don't be evil", which is admirable, and I think the people who work for Google are sincere about it. But they will fail, because corporations concentrate power the way water flows downhill. This week Google enrolled all gmail users, without our consent, in some kind of facebook thingy called Google Buzz. Here's a blog post by a woman whose abusive ex-husband used buzz to track her down. And here's an article about how to disable buzz. At first I thought I was safe because I don't even have a Google profile, but I'm not; and then I thought I might have to make a profile to disable buzz, but I don't. As far as I can tell, what you do is click the "buzz" link right under the "inbox" link, click "view and edit" under people you're following, and remove everyone one by one. Then go back to the main page and down at the bottom you can disable buzz. Unless of course you like it!
I also think it's the nature of the tech system to destroy privacy, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that in practice the people with more wealth/power will use it to buy privacy, so they'll stay hidden while most people are totally exposed. This will enable positive feedback in power-over, which is my definition of social evil.
February 11. Some good news and informational links:
Texas Rancher An Unlikely Environmentalist. He made a fortune selling vacuum cleaners and fried chicken, bought 5500 acres of depleted land, and spent decades turning it into a paradise, including an oryx sanctuary and a giant bat cave.
Here' a good cob house photo gallery.
Ancientfoods is a good blog about ancient foods.
And gigapedia is a site where you can download books, but they don't have an FAQ or the slightest explanation of how the whole thing works, and they require registration. A reader informs me that registered members have access to much better books in the search, including some books that you cannot find through a google torrent search.
February 10. I got several emails and did some more thinking on Monday's question: Why do Americans love a war-on-terror police state, but dread a save-the-earth police state? One answer, which I came close to with my "enemy tribe" comment, is that the story of the war-on-terror tightens and solidifies the tribal identity, or you could call it the collective ego. It makes people more certain of their existing ideas about who they are. But the story of save-the-earth challenges the tribal identity. It asks people to dissolve and expand their sense of who they are, and most Americans find that painful.
A second answer is related to the first. If you're an ordinary propagandized American, the war-on-terror is always against somebody else. Even if they treat you like the enemy by making you walk through body scanners, you know you're not the enemy, so you don't mind. But save-the-earth turns everyone into the enemy, because everyone's present habits are unsustainable and we know it.
The third answer is that the war-on-terror doesn't ask anyone to give up anything, and save-the-earth does. This is directly related to the second, and also to the first: Andy points out that "American identity involves a sense of entitlement to convenience and luxury."
For all of these reasons, an ecological police state is politically impossible. Given present human nature, the only thing that can stop consumption of resources is exhaustion of resources, or collapse. And even then, some people won't believe it. They'll say that the collapse was engineered, and that a few evil people are secretly hoarding enough wealth for us all to live like kings forever.
February 9. Just got back from driving up to the land to check out the roads. There was more snow, ice, and mud than I was expecting. Even with dry weather, it will be another month before I can drive all the way in, and since I'm going to Seattle for most of March, I probably won't start work up there until April.
February 9. Last week my friend Adam completed a training program with Jim and Michele McCarthy. He writes:
The effect of the training is to create a team from a random bunch of strangers who can deliver genius-quality work on demand, without coercion. It was very cool, fun, and exhausting. It is the best training I know for anarchists who want to embody a kinder and more effective world!
Of course, it's rarely tought to anarchists because they have no money, and the teachers are still inside the money economy (just like permaculture). Instead, it's generally taught to software developers in the corporate world, and the language is geared to that world. Here's the book, Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision. And here's a page where you can read or download the core protocols. Basically it's a set of rules and habits for how to work effectively with others. It's all open source and is constantly being tested and adjusted. I'm being a bit too optimistic here, but I can imagine this kind of thing spreading from the decaying corporate world, diversifying, and being like the DNA of the social organisms of the next age.
February 8. I'd better say a few more words about the Audi Green Police commercial. Whether or not it sells any cars, it has pushed a hot button. Here's the reddit/environment comment thread about it, which covers the popular reaction, "Yes, we're headed for a green police state," the green reaction, "Oh no, this is discrediting our whole movement," and many other perspectives. As I said yesterday, I don't think the people who made the ad had any sinister plans at all. They were simply noticing a popular sentiment, fear of an ecological police state, and going with it. So the deeper question is: why are Americans so horrified of a police state justified by saving the Earth, when they have happily accepted a police state justified by fear of the enemy tribe? I'm not going to try to answer that -- it's too hard.
Before I leave the subject of TV commercials, in case anyone missed it, here's one of the most beautiful ones I've ever seen: Embrace Life.
February 7. Today I decided to watch the Super Bowl. I enjoy a good American football game, and it did turn out to be a great game, but mainly I wanted to analyze the ads. Of course, on the surface they're selling products, and on a slightly deeper level they're selling consumption itself. And they're going to pander to the football audience by showing people getting smacked and knocked over, and men defeating women. But if you look beyond that, I think you see a window into the American collective unconscious.
For example, there was the Green Police ad, which shows an absurd ecological police state. My interpretation is not that Al Gore phoned the ad agency and told them to prepare the masses for an ecological police state, but just that people are afraid of it, and the ad is resonating with that fear.
The theme I noticed was people overcoming dangers and disasters, usually by doing nothing or being completely irresponsible. A guy gets away from a Road Warrior gang by throwing his wife out of the car. A guy sleepwalks past deadly wild animals. Montgomery Burns loses his entire fortune but becomes happy when someone gives him the advertised product. Astronomers discover that an asteroid is about to strike, and spend their final hours partying, and then the asteroid turns out to be tiny and harmless. In the most disturbing ad, a plane crashes on an island, a woman finds a radio to call for rescue, and everyone ignores her to happily consume the advertised product. You can see this as a propaganda message, but I see it as a glimpse of how people are feeling: We find ourselves in the middle of a catastrophe, cut off from the rest of the world, but rather than try to reconnect with it, we will indulge in shallow pleasures and not think about our long term needs.
At least there was one ad where a guy uses his knowledge of tornadoes to actively save a bunch of people, and in the most encouraging ad, a bridge collapses and the people spontaneously self-organize to form a human bridge so the advertised product can get across. Even though it's the same crappy product as above, it has a different meaning: something we gain by creatively engaging with the wider world.
Oh, and I almost forgot the Google commercial: smart Americans are thinking of moving to Europe.
February 6. I've archived the old stuff on landblog and added two short new posts. One is the perennial vegetable tasting that I put on this page two weeks ago, and the other is one I just wrote, about our warm and dry winter. It seems like this has been Bizarro Winter all over North America: snow in California, freezing in the south, warm in the north, and dry in the northwest. Sharon Astyk reports that it has also been dry in upstate NY.
February 6. New analysis from Richard Heinberg: China or the U.S.: Which Will Be the Last Nation Standing? China of course, but only for a short time, because the Chinese economy depends on the American economy.
February 5. If anyone wants to use RSS with this site, I don't write a feed myself, but David sends the link for the new Google feed for this page, and you can also get one through Page2RSS. I've just added both links to the bottom of the page.
February 5. A couple pieces from the Oil Drum: What Can We Learn from Gift Economies? and Energy Flow, Emergent Complexity, and Collapse. When I write about complexity, occasionally someone will say that they don't know what "complexity" is. To me it's intuitively obvious, and it's easy to think of examples, but it's damn hard to define it. This article links to some careful definitions, explains the difference between potential complexity and realized complexity, and suggests that realized complexity is enabled by the energy flow through a system. The most interesting bit is this: as human societies have become more complex, individual lives have become simpler, but now, with energy flow decreasing, and complex societies breaking down, the individual lives of the survivors will become more complex.
And some books: The ABC's of Anarchy is an ambitious project, a children's alphabet book illustrated with anarchist concepts.
The Vegetarian Myth is a diet and food book that goes beyond Michael Pollan, into the history of agriculture and the critique of civilization.
And if you want to read more about intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards, and what's wrong with schooling, here's the Amazon Alfie Kohn page.
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 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.