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 31. Something I've been putting off: What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have? I hate it when a headline asks a question that the article doesn't answer, but there's a very important graph halfway down, showing the amount of energy available, and the EROEI, for different energy sources. If this is accurate, then the future is coal -- at least the near future. Then it gets complicated with economic collapse, climate change, the diminishing returns of increasing complexity, possible solar storms, and DIY Garage Biotech.
March 31. On a loose end from a couple days ago, a reader mentions that you can cut car tires with a jigsaw with steel blades. And another reader sends a link to his extensive site about woodfired pottery kilns. I've added it to the landblog links page.
March 30. I'm driving back to Spokane today. From now until the end of October, I expect to be going back and forth between there and the land, maybe three days up, four days down. We'll see how it works out. I can't keep track of all the people who have said they want to come help out with cordwood cob building, but I expect to have a work party at the end of May, and visitors with cars are welcome any time. Email me and I'll send you directions. I have a limited ability to drive carless visitors from the train/bus station to the land and back. Think of it as a camping trip where you don't have to bring water.
Also, Bill sends the best news I've seen all year, a 2010 "Post-Recession" Consumer Study, which shows that as the money economy continues to collapse, Americans are shifting to much better values. It's funny how it keeps calling us "consumers" as it explains that consumption is less and less of our identity.
March 29. A few loose ends on barefoot shoes. After last week's post, Anne commented on FiveFingers that "Other than the sole, the materials are kind of cheap and need frequent repair." But they're not hard to repair, and you can poke a needle through the sole without ripping it.
Another reader sent this link to Barefoot Ted's shop, where you can download free instructions and buy kits for "huarache" sandals. You can make the soles out of raw Vibram material, or "elephant bark", which is cheaper and made from recycled tires. I suppose you could use actual old car tires if you have a way to cut them, and somewhere I saw a photo of a sole made out of duct tape. Also, here's a blog post about Vibram FiveFingers vs huarache sandals, and the different advantages of each one.
March 28, late. Some time in the last two years, Google made a nicer looking satellite image of my land, although it's the same 2006 photo at the same resolution. So I've taken new screenshots and made a new map of the land page, with updated notation to show the tent platform where I was planning to put the cabin.
March 28. Two syrup links: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same. And Pure maple syrup contains medicinally beneficial compounds.
March 27. Short new landblog post about a rare apple variety that I found.
March 26. I don't usually post reader comments, but Joel has lots of good info on yesterday's subject:
I was a student instructor in an undergraduate-level microfabrication class. I taught students how to make diodes, transistors, and LEDs, and worked with them in the lab to test their devices.
Two people in a garage could definitely make transistors. If they made enough transistors to build a computer with, I can see no reason for them to dice them all apart and package them separately, rather than fabricating an integrated circuit and packaging them all together.
Microchips designed for garage fabrication would be much different from what we're familiar with. There are ways to design the circuit to tolerate faulty devices so that if a speck of dust destroys one transistor, its neighbor takes over and the whole circuit still works. There are also tremendous gains in efficiency and capabilities possible when human attention is focused on circuit design, as seen in the Parallax Propeller.
I'm also excited by some of the circuit designs that are re-thinking the ways that computers work. Some of these are not entirely deterministic. They're still fully digital, but they're designed to do noise-tolerant work like audio and video, and their function somewhat resembles an analog device. There are also interesting things being done with field-programmable gate arrays. Many of these designs would translate better to homebrew electronics than, say, an 8088 clone.
Finally, technologies like electron-beam lithography and dip-pen lithography are extremely labor-intensive, but have the potential to make one-of-a-kind circuits that are not just designed better, but built more capably than mass-produced microchips.
On a related note: I work with scientists and engineers, and there's a general tone of respect for intermediate technology among every group of practical people I've met from that field. Mottoes like "low tech is the best tech" and "better is the enemy of good enough" come up all the time, in discussions of how to accomplish something. Any contact with the real world of high technology illustrates how important its predecessors are, partly because it's often necessary to backtrack quite a ways in order to build up the capacity to advance.
I guarantee you that the best half of the engineers who now work on feature bloat, are dreaming about more meaningful work. As the market for bloat deflates, they'll spend more time in garages. It has happened before: lots of companies like Apple were founded around the time of the previous oil shock.
March 25. Adam sends two more links on today's subject: a page about the transistor computer, with links to many photos, and a Kevin Kelly post on Garage Biotech.
March 25. (permalink) Sunday night I had to pick someone up from the airport, and the flight was delayed so I spent a couple hours reading magazines. The most depressing magazine by far was one about bicycles. The writers were total whores to the advertisers, making glib unsupported arguments that it's time to get rid of your obsolete five year old bike and buy a new one, and $3000-5000 is the mid-range of what you should pay. And what is "better" about newer bikes? As far as I can tell, very small improvements in performance, and crazy increases in the difficulty of manufacturing and repairing them. Here's a blog post on the same subject, The Luddite Frontier.
I've often said that I don't think civilization will collapse all the way to the stone age, but now I'm not so sure. The only way to stop a slide to the stone age is to focus human attention on intermediate technologies. This principle is independent of peak oil or any other mechanism of collapse. If you don't believe that technological complexity will magically keep increasing forever, then you have to accept that it goes up and down. So the next time it goes down, if we want to save computers, cars, bicycles, shovels, anything, we have to learn to build and maintain them with simpler tools and fewer resources.
I call this The Garage Principle: during a fast drop in overall complexity, the best test of whether a given technology will survive is whether it can be kept alive by dedicated amateurs working at home.
Last night I hung out with Adam, and he mentioned a guy who made a computer at home using no silicon chips, just massive numbers of transistors. So you could have a garage industry that makes transistors, and sells or trades them to other garages that put them together into computers. Other people could scavenge old chips. If the complex and fragile fiber optic system goes down, we could still have an internet with wires strung through trees, or wifi signal amplifiers powered by solar panels.
I can imagine a steampunk renaissance, where you have a horse with bioengineered gut bacteria that allows it to eat plastic, and you ride it to the next town to trade a load of ball bearings for a bolt of spider silk to make the wings of an ultralight airplane to carry 50 terabytes of data over the mountains. But will this happen? Right now, how many engineers are working on stripped-down garage tech, and how many are working on feature bloat? How fast can we adapt?
March 23. A reader sends this book-length blog post about Downtown Rural Detroit. I recommend you disable JavaScript so you don't get annoying pop-up windows every time you mouse over something -- I swear, the internet is already sentient, and it's suicidal. Anyway, lots of good stuff here about Detroit, and more generally about the post-industrial future of cities.
It also covers a developer named Hantz and his plan for a new giant farm inside Detroit. On the surface it looks like a good idea, and it might save lives by speeding up the rate at which vacant lots get converted to growing food. But in the long term I think this is an evil move. Any tolerable society must be built from a foundation of autonomy. In Detroit, that would mean that every vacant lot is either taken back by nature, or owned by whoever farms it. In Hantz's scheme, he would be the owner and decision-maker, and the farmers would be something like Medieval serfs, unless they could afford to leave.
We should not be surprised. The Dominator paradigm, hierarchy, power-over, is much older and more resilient than industrial civilization. Even some primitive tribes have it. It's not going to go away just because the oil runs out. We're going to have to keep struggling with it for a very long time.
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.