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
April 5. Epic new post from Anne about myth and rewilding. For what I would call "myth", our appealing cultural stories about how the world should be, Anne uses the word "authentic", and contrasts this with "real", meaning the world as we actually experience it if we pay attention. So, Republicans have a myth of old-fashioned small town Utopia that never quite existed, while those of us who understand the critique of civilization are tempted to have a myth of primitive Eden that never quite existed. And we shouldn't do that, because...
That's actually a hard question. Why not wallow in myth? Because the academic world won't take us seriously? I'm sorry, but they don't matter. Maybe that's why Sarah Palin upsets intellectuals, because she reminds us that myth beats rationality. But in what context does myth beat rationality? When 1) you're trying to influence people, and 2) those people are operating on a subconscious level. You can see this in politics, in marketing, and in the "seduction community". If you want someone to vote for you, buy your product, or come home with you, your best strategy by far is to engage them on a deep level on which they're not paying attention. And if you learn to pay attention to the deep levels, which is what meditation is mostly about, then those tricks won't work on you. (Not that liberals are enlightened -- they just have different buttons than the ones Sarah Palin is pushing.)
So, the reason to avoid dealing in myth, is that you're making an alliance with lack of awareness. It's an ethical reason, and doesn't emerge as a tactical reason for many generations. I fear there will be a primitivist religion, which will destroy many harmful technologies that would have died out anyway, while keeping humans on a level of awareness where we're easily manipulated. In the very long term, we must change our nature to become hard to manipulate, and we invest in that by "waking up" and by creating situations in which waking up is rewarding.
April 5. A reader just commented on my sourdough page, which reminded me that I needed to update it to include the new trend of no-knead bread, and my own new method that's not quite that simple. So I've just done that, and also fixed a broken link.
April 3. Thanks Aaron for reading the comment section on the Archdruid post and finding this: Crop Mob is a blog about "crop mobbing", where a bunch of people descend on a local farm and work for a day. Why would anyone do that? Because they want hands-on experience working the land with a fun group, and they can't afford to pay a hundred dollars a day for a permaculture class. Here's a good NY Times article on crop mobbing, Plow Shares.
Related: from 2008, a great critique of the so-called Green Revolution, in which nice scientists who knew nothing about politics or ecology thought they were saving billions of lives, when really they were helping industrial agribusiness to impoverish and enslave humanity and turn the planet into a toxic desert.
April 2. The latest Archdruid post, Riddles in the Dark, puts together a lot of important insights. I'll try to summarize:
1) Certain nations feed off the labor and resources of the rest of the world. 2) The citizens of these nations need to be paid off or distracted, or they will violently revolt. The Romans called this "bread and circuses". 3) One of the big ways we are paid off is through extremely high wages. I would add, we mistake these for low wages because the Beast immediately steals this money back from us through rent and interest, so we need extremely high wages to not be homeless. Instead of pitying Africans who live on a dollar a day, we should ask, "What if our society was set up so that we could live on a dollar a day, and still make $15 an hour?"
4) Because our wages are so high, human labor is the limiting factor in the size and growth of businesses and other money-based systems. Economists have mistaken this aberration for a universal truth, so they view efficiency and productivity in terms of how much stuff is done per unit of human labor. This leads to insanity like industrial agriculture, which wastes massive amounts of energy and physical resources, destroys topsoil, and produces unhealthful food, but allows one farmer to work hundreds of acres.
5) But economists haven't thought it through. When agriculture and manufacturing become more "efficient", what happens to the people who lose their jobs? If they are cut off from the benefits of the Empire, they turn against it politically. I would add that in Europe, unemployed people just go on the dole, but in America, with our puritan work ethic, they have to be given other jobs. These jobs are mostly meaningless and degrading busywork in finance, insurance, real estate, and high tech. I read a comment somewhere by a guy who used to think the movie Office Space was funny, until he actually got one of those jobs and realized that it was a depressing documentary.
6) Finally, Greer points out that with nearly seven billion people in the world, and resources running out, viewing efficiency in terms of human labor is obsolete. Inevitably, more and more work is going to shift back to being done by human hands.
April 1. Today I'm picking up my first visitor of the year, Ben, and driving him straight to the land where he's going to camp for a while, against my recommendation. I don't plan to spend much time up there myself until this cold weather blows over.
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 their own transportation are welcome any time. Email me and I'll send you directions. I have a limited ability to drive 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. 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 17. Somehow I missed this excellent 2008 article, Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable.