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
March 6. Here's another personal project that I've been working on sporadically for more than ten years. It's not finished, but it's finally in good enough shape to make public: my favorite films list.
March 5. Chris sends a thorough analysis he wrote of the Bloom Box. Basically, it's a moderate improvement over existing natural gas-burning generators, for a much higher price.
Speaking of natural gas, in case you missed it, Study Says Undersea Release of Methane Is Under Way.
And here's a personal project I've just finished. For a couple years I've been slowly going through my favorite musical artists and making CD compilations. Usually I don't write about them, but I've just done a band that some of you might be familiar with, called the Beatles. What if you had to cut the entire Beatles catalog down to one audio CD? That link goes to what I came up with, and it's been a long time since I've had so much fun writing something.
March 4. (permalink) The other day Jeff Vail made a great little post about surge capacity. His context is the law business, where lawyers are expected to work at maximum capacity all the time, so then when a case needs extra work, they can't do it without a big drop in quality. As a general rule: "When a system seeks to maximize output, it reduces its resiliency to perform and to adapt to stresses."
This reminds me of a brilliant site that I haven't looked at in years: Chris Davis's Idle Theory. There's much more on the site, but here are a few tastes. Idle Theory on evolution:
Zero idleness, or complete 'busyness', is the threshold of death. The nearer any creature approaches this threshold, the more endangered its life becomes. In a time of difficulty, when all creatures must work harder, some varieties or types may be reduced to zero idleness, and driven to extinction. It is the busiest, most hard-working creatures which face extinction, and the idlest which survive. In Idle Theory, natural selection means the regular extinction of the least idle creatures, and the survival of the idlest.
On politics, from the 2009 preface:
Busy human societies are ones in which few people have the idle time in which to consider the overall direction of human society, and political decisions which affect everyone are taken by the minority who have sufficient idle time to frame such policies. And so busy societies tend to be authoritarian in nature... The transition of a society from a monarchy to a democracy is a consequence of increasing social idleness.
On economics:The primary purpose of economic activity is the maintenance and increase of idle time. It is only when there is sufficient idle time made available by this primary economy that it becomes possible for a secondary economy to emerge, in which a variety of luxuries and amusements and pastimes are manufactured and traded. Before idle time can be disposed of in making and enjoying these luxuries, this idle time first has to primarily be produced.
And on ethics:Ethics is not so much about what human free agents should and should not do, but rather what part-time free agents should and should not do in order to become as far as possible completely free agents.
...
In weighing up whether some behaviour is right or wrong, do not ask whether you like it or dislike it, whether it is normal or abnormal, whether it is legal or illegal: ask whether it gains or loses anyone their time.
March 3. (permalink) Last week when I wrote about saving knowledge, everyone agreed that how-to-do-it knowledge is much easier to preserve alive than dead -- through a living community of people teaching each other, rather than through written instructions. This is because if a skill is at all difficult, it contains subtleties that are easy to understand and transmit through hands-on practice, but almost impossible to transmit through words and pictures.
Dameon had the idea to take this basic principle and do some quantitative thinking. Over the last few centuries, as western civilization has grown more complex, it has depended on a larger and larger number of living skills. We are now orders of magnitude above the number of living skills that a forager-hunter tribe depends on. How was this possible? Through increasing population, and through specialization. There are people who know how to design a computer chip, but have no ability to feed themselves without a massive industrial infrastructure -- which now depends on computer chips.
Now, what happens when the population stops rising? Can we rein in and stabilize complexity so it doesn't overshoot our ability to know how to do everything? I doubt it. And what happens when some crisis forces specialists to generalize? If fiber optic technicians have to grow potatoes to survive, key skills for maintaining fiber optic networks could be lost. There are probably tens of thousands of skills equally obscure and important. And if a skill dies, even if there are still books about it, the human attention required to resurrect it from books is much greater than the human attention that would have been required to keep it alive in the first place. So if we want to bring back a dead skill, without an increase in population or specialization, we have to sacrifice some living skills.
What we're looking at is catabolic collapse -- a loss of complexity that feeds back and causes more loss of complexity, and so on until the system finds a new point of equilibrium. Our safety net is in people who are preserving intermediate skills. They will become the hubs of the post-collapse world. Forest gardeners and goat farmers and cob house builders will keep us from falling to the stone age, and I like to think we'll stabilize in a kind of steampunk age, if enough people learn DIY industrial skills, like the ones in Lindsay's technical books.
March 2. Remember there's a new ranprieur subreddit. I'm going to be spending a lot of time on the land this summer, and it would be nice if you all could find a way to talk to each other without depending on me. If you send me a link and I don't post it, you can always post it there, or on the Yuku.com board.
Reddit had some trouble over the weekend, and the hive mind easily slips into witch hunt mode, but it remains my top source of good links. My favorite subreddits, in no particular order, are collapse, frugal, environment, DIY, psychology, energy, space, technology, self sufficiency, and science when they're not bashing the enemies of scientism. (For similar reasons, the politics subreddit is all about the American right, and atheism is all about religion.)
Another personal subject: a couple weeks ago when I got sick, I didn't eat anything for more than a day, and since then I've noticed that I only have to drink half as much water. My digestive system must have badly needed a reboot. So from now on I'm going to try to do a fast every two weeks, where I eat nothing for a day and two nights, and eat lightly on the two surrounding days. I'm not asking for advice. I've tried all kinds of fasts, and they're never fun, but science, ancient traditions, and my own experience all agree that fasting is good for my health.
March 1. Today, some scary hard crash links: An update on the methane time bomb, the feedback loop where methane warms the atmosphere, which thaws and releases more methane.
An analysis of solar storms. Inevitably there will be a storm as big as the ones in 1921 and 1859, and it will burn out most communication satellites and bring down some electric grids (assuming they haven't already gone down for other reasons).
And from last week, a Reddit IAmA by a guy who lived through the 1992 L.A. Riots. We really need to stop using the word "riot" and be more precise. I was in the so-called "riots" in 1999 in Seattle, and I never felt even slightly unsafe. It was like a big street party.
The difference was in the character of the lawbreakers, and also the stories they told. Whether or not you agree that corporations are evil, you have to admit that someone who tells that story is going to be breaking windows and not breaking heads. The dangerous story is that a certain category of people are evil. And the greatest danger is when that story is told not by the lawbreakers, but by the rulers.
February 28. Rain of fish in Australia (thanks Larry). This kind of thing has happened many times, and Charles Fort covered it in 1919 in The Book of the Damned, chapter 7. He points out that if falling creatures or objects were sucked up in tornadoes, they would be sorted and distributed by weight, not by species; that small frogs have fallen but never large frogs or tadpoles; and that the tornado explanation is never backed up by any observation of a tornado. Notice how narrow-minded we are: a statement that closes doors -- "it must have been a tornado" -- requires no evidence at all, while a statement that opens doors -- "our present model of reality cannot explain this" -- requires such a massive amount of evidence that the same anomalies can be swept under the rug decade after decade.
If you want to read Fort, the key is the first chapter of his first book, where he scorns all our explanations and definitions and categories and laws, comparing them to drawing a circle in the sea. So when he offers his own explanations, like the planet Genesistrine or the Super-Sargasso Sea, he's mostly joking.
February 27. So I'm following the earthquake and tsunami, and I'm not surprised to find that the TV news treats viewers like sheep. It occurs to me that there are at least two directions that any information source can take. One is: "You are powerless, but the experts and authorities are benevolent, competent, and in control, and they will help you and tell you what to do." The other is: "You are a trusted participant in power, so we will give you the best information we have, and you can figure out what to do with it."
February 26. Dmitry Orlov has some more good posts up. The other day he wrote about how difficult it will be to switch our manufacturing over to high-quality items that will be reliable for decades, and why it will probably be done by low-budget garage industry. Also he is publishing a new book, titled Hold Your Applause because America has not quite yet experienced a Soviet-style collapse. And below that, he examines the permanently unemployed as a new and growing consumer class.
There's been a lot of buzz about the Bloom Energy fuel cell. I've been waiting for a concise article cutting through the hype, and that link goes to the first one I've seen. Also note that a fuel cell requires fuel. It's not a source of energy, just a way to turn energy from one form into another.
And a reader sends this 1906 San Francisco streetcar video, taken just four days before the earthquake. This goes back to the subject of saving information for the future: the most valuable thing you can save is a glimpse of what it's like to live in another world, and therefore, what other worlds are possible. In the video, notice how everybody moves. Occasionally someone will speed up to get out of the way of a vehicle, or run playfully, but nobody is rushing, nobody is stressed out, and despite the high density, nobody is stuck in traffic. It's just smooth, friendly chaos.
February 25. New landblog post with cool photos of fire.
February 25. David over at Edge of Grace has been doing some great blogging, with nine posts in the last month.
Thoughtful Cryptogon piece, The Future Where Soda Cans Have Screens, about scary ways that computers are seducing us farther and farther from reality.
And after a comment from Robert, I've changed the bit I wrote the other day about scavenging, to let business owners off the hook and blame cops instead. Here's the new sentence:
Will they know that people went to jail for taking food out of the garbage, because the authorities were envious of people living outside the waste economy, but could not admit it consciously?
February 24. I'm done with the preserving-information subject. Yesterday's post has been edited down a bit and archived at the bottom of the original permalink.
Here's something loosely related. Erik sends this nice article on the Garden of Eden excavation in Turkey. Basically, ancient people had a sophisticated society with stone monuments, before they invented grain agriculture and ruined everything.
Loosely related to that, Lauren sends this article on an ancient birth control herb called silphium, which was harvested to extinction before anyone could figure out how to cultivate it.
February 23. Got a bunch of emails on preserving information, and it's more complex than I originally thought. What I failed to define, for you or even for myself, was what kind of information we would save, or should save. Every kind of information is a different topic.
The most overrated category is how-to-do-it information. Anne points out that the best way to preserve knowledge of how to do things, or maybe the only way, is to make it part of a living culture. Others suggest that our how-to-do-it information might just be harmful, since we've nearly destroyed the world with it. And since we're talking about thousands of years, and not ten years, there's really no point in telling people how to grow squash or tan hides.
Another category is history. On the broad scale, it will be obvious to everyone that we mined all the metal and built giant steel-framed buildings. But what about medium-scale history, the stuff historians write about? If we find it helpful to read Herodotus, people of the future will want to know the same kind of thing about us.
What I find most interesting is human-scale history. If you imagine going back in a time machine, what exactly is exciting about it? Most of us are not looking for the technical details of Damascus steel. We're wondering what it's like to live in a different time. And if you could go thousands of years in the future, what would you want to talk about? And what would they ask you about?
Diane points out that everyone will know how wasteful we were by digging up our landfills. But will they know how we felt about it? Will they see us wallowing in hedonistic pleasure, or will they know how many of us were depressed? Will they know that people went to jail for taking food out of the garbage, because the authorities were envious of people living outside the waste economy, but could not admit it consciously? Will they guess that at the all-time peak of energy consumption and individualism, so many of us felt individually powerless?
Will they know what made us happy? That's too big of a subject! But I can't think of anything there that's easy to send into the future.
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. 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?