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 22. I'm not going to comment much on the medical bubble bailout ("health care reform") until I see how it works in practice, which could take a few years. But I did read that 35 states are considering bills to exempt their citizens from the mandate.
The other day I went down to REI and finally bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers. After reading this excellent long review of FiveFingers and Injinji socks, I decided to get the KSO model:
In both online reviews and in talking with long time FF patrons, there's general agreement that the KSO is the most perfect fit of the Five Fingers models, and is perhaps the best overall design. I'd have to agree: in my experience, the shoe that fit the best is the KSO.
But here's the twist. Most people who review FiveFingers are coming to them from regular shoes. They all agree that their feet feel liberated and wonderful. I'm coming to them from pure barefooting, and I think the heels are too thick. I would prefer a barefoot shoe with nothing on the bottom but a kevlar membrane... and those exist, but other brands of barefoot shoes do not have a wide enough toe box. I hope Keen is working on one. Meanwhile, I will continue to go completely barefoot when conditions permit, and use the FiveFingers as a backup.
March 20. John Robb at Global Guerrillas has had some good stuff lately, about how failed attacks can be as disruptive as successful ones, about oil prices and the economy, and about real-world games:
For active online gamers real life is broken. It doesn't make any sense. Effort isn't connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there's a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure...
...
So the really big idea isn't figuring out how to USE online gamers for real world purposes. Instead, it's about finding a way to use online games to make real life better for the gamers. In short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems.
Next, from yesterday, a Reddit IAmA by a guy who claims to have survived the earthquake in Chile, with scary stories about violent looters and water shortages. Even if he made it up, it's still good fiction, and I agree with his advice to know your neighbors and have a shotgun. A reminder: I don't believe in the zombie apocalypse, where this kind of thing happens globally all at once. But it will continue to happen locally in one place after another.
Finally, last night I watched Duck, You Sucker, the Mexican Revolution film that Sergio Leone made after Once Upon a Time in the West. It's pretty lame; I don't recommend it. But there was one great quote:
I know what I am talking about when I am talking about the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, "We have to have a change." So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They're dead! That's your revolution. So, please, don't tell me about revolutions. And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!
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.