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 22. Links related to the below: the Long Now Foundation, and an article by one of them about about Avoiding a Digital Dark Age. It covers the issues of preservation and comprehensibility, but not the issue of low-quality information burying the good stuff.
Also, the Long Now people seem to be mostly techies who are much too optimistic about the survival of the present system. For example, their best idea is the amazing Rosetta Disk, 13,000 pages of text and images, micro-etched into a small piece of metal, and readable after 2000 years with just a few lenses. The article says, "Perhaps it is better thought of as a cautionary example of what our future might look like if we are not able to make the digital world in which we find ourselves remain successful over time." I think of it as something we should be mass-producing, making thousands of copies each of thousands of versions, and storing them in caves.
Then again, maybe it would be more fun for our descendants to do their own thinking and creating instead of following ours.
February 22. (permalink)
I've been thinking more about why exactly I don't save everything I post, and why even my favorite posts get edited down for archiving. It's not to save myself work, because it would be less work to just keep everything. And it's not because I don't care about preservation. It's because I care more about preservation, and I understand that preservation is not a function of storage space, but a function of human attention.
How much storage space do you have for physical stuff? A few closets? Maybe a big house? What if you had a magical extra-dimensional space, on the outside as small as a closet, and on the inside as big as a warehouse? And what if almost all physical items were dirt cheap or even free? Suppose you also had a genie who could instantly store and retrieve anything you put in there. Then how much stuff would you have? Maybe you would fill the warehouse and get another storage unit the size of a jet airplane hangar.
And then what would happen when you died? The genie can store and retrieve but it cannot judge quality or usefulness. Who's going to sort through it all? What if your heirs have their own magic warehouses, and they have the option to fold yours up and throw it in the trash? And then what happens when they die? Also, what if the lifespan of genies is only 10-20 years, and the new generation can't recognize the stuff stored by the old?
Obviously, I'm talking about the way we treat information. I know someone who works in the field of information archiving and retrieval, and she says we are now living in a lost age: when historians look back at our time, they will have no idea what happened. The ancient Maya carved their records in stone. Medieval scholars wrote on vellum, which can easily last 1000 years. How long does a CD last, or a flash drive? And who will be able to read it? After only 20 years, with no tech crash, it's already very difficult to recover data from 5¼ inch floppies. Even our books are almost always written on self-consuming acidic paper. And there is little or no effort to sort out what's most important. According to my source, book-archiving warehouses file them by size and date of arrival.
What if you took a handful of diamonds, scattered them in a massive pile of gravel, mixed it all up, and then took a few handfuls out? What are the odds you would get a diamond back? What if the diamonds were disguised as gravel and could only be identified by close examination? What if the whole pile gradually disappeared? This is what we're doing with our information.
To preserve our story, we need to do three things: 1) practice sorting information and editing it down to the very best stuff; 2) put it in a form that will be readable in the remote future; 3) if possible, build a human tradition of keeping track of the archives. I'm also wondering if there's any way to store music for thousands of years. Turntable records made of titanium?
February 21. Adam comments that it's frustrating to link to my blog from his blog, because I don't have permalinks, and he suggests some new software called Jekyll that can generate a web 2.0 site from static html.
I liked web 1.0 better, back before the ads started to move and talk, when you could still get around with dial-up, when people went online for information and still looked for community in the physical world. And I'm really more interested in web 0.0 -- using the internet, as long as it lasts, to prepare for a world without an internet. So even if someone made a mirror of this site, and turned every post into a permanent file with comments, I wouldn't go there myself.
But I can make one concession for permalinks. First, every post that I've ever archived already has a permalink. You can find it by doing view source on the archive page and reading the name in the (a name="") tag at the top of the post. Then the link is the archive URL, a number sign, and the name. For example, here's the permalink to my January 13 post about the book Gaiome: http://ranprieur.com/archives/028.html#gaiome. So, from now on, when I make a post that I don't think would be a waste of time to link to, I'll pre-archive it immediately and post a permalink.
February 20. Updated post: Thanks Aaron for doing some research on Jeremy Rifkin. Here's a loooong transcript of a talk he gave back in 1991, An afternoon with Jeremy Rifkin. I've read the whole thing now, and it's a wide-ranging critique of the mythology and culture of the industrial age, including stuff about the enclosure movement, cartesian metaphysics, economic growth, and utilitarianism. There's also some stuff I haven't seen before, like analyses of sight vs smell, digital vs analog watches, and "hot evil" vs "cold evil", and a really astute observation of how we use the word "history" as an insult.
But what puzzles me is: why is Rifkin running well-funded foundations and talking to CEO's, while other people with similar ideas are writing obscure books or living on the fringes of the internet? It might be a simple as this: he has connections and feels comfortable among the powerful, while I have connections and feel comfortable on the fringe; and the ideas that we're channeling are coming out all over, because they're needed. (I'm talking about cultural and philosophical ideas. Rifkin's support for hydrogen energy is a blunder.)
It's also interesting that he predicted "a leap of consciousness by an entire generation" within the 1990's. Ha. I think our consciousness is changing, but it's even slower and more subtle than the collapse. Hardly anyone who lives through it will notice it, but in 500 years they will look back and see it clearly.
February 20. John Robb posts on rage against the machine. I've been thinking the same thing: that guy who flew a plane into the IRS building, and that professor who shot people when she was denied tenure, are symptoms of the decline of America. We've all been raised with the belief that if we work hard and play by the rules, we will get high-status jobs that pay a lot of money. But for someone to have high status, many others have to have low status, and money is meaningless without people so desperate for money that they will obey you if you give them some. As American power declines, there will be less and less money and status to go around, and tens of millions of people who were promised "success" will have it taken from them. And some of them will lash out.
I'm thinking that this kind of violence will be mostly done by people born between 1950 and 1975. Older people have already enjoyed their golden age, and younger people have no illusions that they're going to get one. But even people who are not angry at the system will still be going through pain and lashing out at whoever is nearby.
February 19. Now, back to regular blogging. This is the greatest Onion article ever: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.
On a related subject, an interview with Jeremy Rifkin on the third industrial revolution. I'm not exactly sure who this guy is. He's not a doomer and seems pretty close to the centers of power, but he's talking about a global culture based on empathy, and the end of the top-down economy.
Finally, from a couple weeks ago, a mind-blowing reddit comment on mythical oil:
In the future, even if there isn't a collapse, there will be no crude oil from the ground. Records will exist of it, but future people will have no material example of the substance our society runs on. Crude oil might be seen as a mythical, magical substance, something made up.
Corollary: what non-renewable resources might precursor civilizations have used up that we'll never know about? What "mythical" materials actually existed but don't anymore?
February 19. Thanks Shawn for starting a ranprieur subreddit! To participate, you will first have to make a reddit account, which is easy. Also, reddit is a great source for news and ideas, but only if you make careful use of the subreddit system. Here's the reddit FAQ. I have rewritten the communities page to include this information.
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 would prefer to take no responsibility for any community based on my writing -- although I remain burdened 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.
In hindsight, I should have explicitly kept my distance from the forums from the very beginning. 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.