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 19. Yesterday's subject reminded me of this article on sacred values:
What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular, they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange.
The article talks about Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians, but of course Americans have sacred values too. One of them is driving cars, which is a special case of the Greatest American Value: our entitlement to massive resource consumption. George Bush Sr. famously said that the American way of life is not negotiable. He was not establishing a doctrine, merely pointing out a political reality. The one thing that would drive Americans to rise up in a violent revolution would be a government that tried to forcibly take away our high-consumption lifestyle.
At the same time, that lifestyle is not sustainable. We will lose it, and people will be angry, and looking for someone to blame. And if you give up the lifestyle voluntarily, and seem to benefit from its absence, by happily riding a bicycle or living without electricity, they might blame you.
March 18. A reader sends a car company's response to yesterday's race video. Don't bother watching it, but the idea is that the cyclist wins the race by rushing furiously and being stressed out and reckless, while the driver is relaxed and comfortable. As both a driver and a cyclist, I think this is exactly backwards, and I see now that yesterday's video is also deceptive. Unless you're passing through the center of a giant city, a car is faster, but it's also more stressful, because you are completely at the mercy of traffic and lights, and a slight bump to another vehicle, or a mechanical breakdown, could cost you thousands of dollars. On a bicycle I move more slowly, but I feel completely relaxed and free.
March 17. Still too busy to do heavy thinking, but here are more links: Somehow I missed this excellent 2008 article, Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable. That's an alternate link I tracked down because the original article requires a subscription.
A day-old reddit IAmA by a guy who lives in a remote cabin.
A nine minute video that I will summarize so you don't have to watch it: Four guys race across London in a car, a bicycle, public transportation, and a boat. The bicycle wins, the boat comes in second, and the car comes in last!
Also, last night I watched a 100 minute DVD that I will not summarize: Moon. I'll just say that it's one of the best sci-fi films I've ever seen, and that if the key technologies ever become common, this world is going to get really strange.
Finally, a scientist reader who specializes in untangling causation and correlation comments on yesterday's link about serious talk and happiness: a third factor, positively related to both serious talk and happiness, is that you're spending time with people you trust.
March 16. Four psychology links. First, a TED talk about experience vs memory in the context of happiness. When you think about it, being happy in the present moment, and remembering being happy, are almost completely different things. (Open the transcript in the upper right if you'd rather read it in five minutes than listen to it in 20.)
Happy people talk more seriously, while unhappy people make more shallow small talk. Researchers still don't know if serious talk makes you happy, or if being happy makes serious talk more appealing, or if they're both caused by another factor.
The difference between a feeling and a state of mind never occurred to me: Feelings are temporary, while states of mind are there for the long term; and it's not good to try to control your feelings, but it is good to consciously choose your state of mind.
What alcohol does to your mind. I heard about a study showing that people never break their cultural taboos under alcohol, which suggests that it doesn't really reduce inhibitions. This article mentions several contradictory and unexpected effects of alcohol, and explains them like this: "With more alcohol our brains become less and less able to process peripheral cues and more focused on what is right in front of us." I've never liked being drunk, so now I'm thinking it's either because I can focus without alcohol, or because I enjoy peripheral cues.
March 15. I've started my Seattle catsit but I'm still pretty busy. Just saw this on Global Guerrillas: Time Magazine publishes a brief utopian vision about the Dropout Economy.
March 14. New post on landblog about my sister's chickens.
March 12. Driving to Seattle today and I'll be busy all weekend, so I don't expect to post again until Monday.
March 11. (permalink) This article on the Savanna Principle explains how "the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment." For example, we think images on the TV are our friends. This reminds me of an email conversation about that community garden that got bulldozed in Los Angeles a few years ago, and how people were outraged. You can find ten thousand examples of the same kind of thing. It seems like half the internet is nothing but finger-pointing at terrible things that governments and corporations are doing.
I think we're making a tragic mistake, and it's because we have no ancestral experience of large businesses and governments, so we try to understand them by projecting something we're familiar with. Because they seem to be made up of people, we project our ancestral model of the family. Now, a very small business or government might behave like a family. But a large one is a completely different thing. It behaves much more like something else in our ancestral environment: a fire! Would we be outraged if a fire burned down a community garden? Would we try to stop a fire by lying down in its path? Would we pass a law against a fire? Of course not! Likewise, all of these tactics, even laws, are ignored and overrun by the logic of large centralized systems, their drive to leverage power-over into more power-over until everything in their path is consumed.
When we see these systems as fires, our strategy becomes clear: Stop moralizing, get out of their way, and starve them of fuel. And in the long term, we can prevent "fires" by designing our culture, our fundamental values, to prevent positive feedback in power-over. We already know how to do this on the human scale. Suppose you borrow a hammer from your neighbor and forget about it. Twenty years later, your neighbor's lawyer informs you that you owe him 100 hammers. That's ridiculous! And yet we think it's normal and fair for large systems to operate by those rules... and then we're surprised that they behave like psychopaths!
There's a simple rule that would greatly reduce economic domination: universal negative interest. If anything is borrowed, the borrower pays back less. Or to come at the same thing from a different direction: a non-user can never be an owner. The owner of anything is whoever is using it in a respectful way. These rules would force our big systems to be stable horizontal networks. But I don't know how to get there from here, or how to stay there. I think we're going to have to wait until big systems have been around so long that they're part of our ancestral environment, so that we have a biological understanding of them. And because I'm a follower of Rupert Sheldrake, I think that might take us thousands of years, instead of hundreds of thousands.
March 10. Unrelated links. First, here's an excellent piece from a few weeks back about the beauty of trans-collapse living: My Wabi-Sabi Life. I can't find a good pullquote, but it's about a Japanese word that doesn't translate into English, and how the author sees it in her decaying midwestern ghetto neighborhood.
I've been putting off posting the livestock subreddit to see if it goes anywhere. It's still sputtering along with 21 links in its one month history.
And keep doing that and you'll go blind: watching 3D television might cause long-term damage to your depth perception.
March 9. (permalink) Aaron sends this article about "How to really make change happen". The author makes a distinction between "activism" and "organizing", where activism is useless symbolic expression, and organizing means building a base of people who know each other and do tactical actions.
So far so good, but beyond that, I think this guy is mostly wrong. He claims that, through organizing, the animal rights and environmental movements have "registered enormous social and political gains." Sorry, but domesticated animals are suffering worse than ever with the rise of factory farms, and wild animals are going extinct faster than any time in the last 60 million years. And I love recycling, but as long as wilderness is being "developed" faster than it's being allowed to regrow, the environmental movement is losing. I've been following politics since 1980 and the only real gain for the left that I've seen is the acceptance of gay people.
I don't think this near-total failure is because we were organizing wrong. Take a step back and look at the great successes of the golden age of organizing. Mostly it was categories of people, formerly excluded, fighting to share in the benefits of a massively wealthy expanding economy. This was simple to understand, it was entirely in the interests of the people who were organizing, and it was something that more powerful people could afford to give up.
The kinds of things that we would organize for now are not so easy: to end a war fought by volunteers, to stop the extraction of resources on which our own comfort depends, to get a bigger share of a shrinking economy. I can think of only two reforms that would be clearly beneficial for organizers and for society as a whole: debt cancellation, and squatter's rights. But either of those would first require a deep change in thinking, because even most poor people still think it's perfectly normal and fair for the have-nots to pay a fee to the haves for the right to use what the haves wouldn't have in the first place if they hadn't taken it from the have-nots through the same fees in the past.
Now take another step back. So far we've been talking only about changing the system from within. But look at all the tactically effective organizing to take care of our needs outside the system: community supported agriculture, farmers' markets, rainwater harvesting, backyard gardens and chicken coops. Of course we still have a long way to go, but this is where the action is, not on the Titanic but in the lifeboats. Even people who believe in the system are losing their ability to participate -- losing their jobs, living in foreclosed houses, ignoring their debts, and organizing with friends and family to get by. And they're being tactically smarter than the old-time lefties. At this point, passing a law to forgive debts is impossible, while leaving them unpaid is inevitable.
March 8. New post from Anne about the Age of Broken Hearts. The idea is, 60 years ago, Americans felt good about being part of a story of powerful technology overseen by a strong central government. And now, as illustrated by the X-Files, we still believe in that story, but we think it's sinister and frightening. Then Anne connects the pentagon shooter, the IRS plane crasher, the denied-tenure killer, and the Muslim army base killer:
...all were highly educated and groomed for successful professional careers, and went violently over the edge at the point where those careers became untenable. All saw themselves acting against a coordinated, secretive and insidious enemy that had stifled them.
...
The fact is that people who are hungry will not burn down their own house in frustration, but people who have lost the narrative thread of their lives will - despair is more violent than starvation, and stories are more dear than bread.
To me, this explains the foilheads. Now, I agree with many "conspiracy theories", but I don't buy the master narrative: that a shadowy alliance of very rich people, government, and technology is in control of history. If the elite are planning to use carbon emissions to create a one-world government, then they're fools, because a one-world government is no longer possible. Big centralized systems get bigger only when they're young and flexible and extracting abundant resources. When they're old and ossified, and resources are scarce, they shrink and crack and break apart. Of course they can still be dangerous, in the same way that a starving dog is more dangerous than a well-fed dog. But it's not at all the same danger that Orwell wrote about.
But it's easier to turn the story of global techno-utopia on its head, and participate as an enemy, than it is to imagine a different story. If we can't keep getting richer, if we can't conquer space, if nobody can rule the world, and if we've long forgotten the stories of our nature-based ancestors, then what are we here for?
March 8. Couple nurtured virtual child while real baby starved. Coming soon: Virtual Earth!
And two links about bees. Stung From Behind is a very complex article about honeybee decline. I don't understand all of it, but a key point is that American honeybees are declining because honey crops and crops that need pollination are shifting to other countries. But here's some good news: Illegal beekeeping catches on in New York City.
March 7. I just deleted the "most overrated" section from the bottom of my favorite films list, because no good can come of it. Also, I just watched the Academy Awards with the sound off. Why do best foreign language film nominees always make other countries look so much less fun than America? And can you believe that Kathryn Bigelow is 58? Anyway, tomorrow I'll get back to the end of the world and stuff.
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.)