April 6. I love this rant about vampires: fictional vampires have now been watered down to where they're exactly like humans except sexy and strong and immortal, and yet they mope and whine about it.
Why is this story so popular? Maybe vampires are a metaphor for Americans sucking the blood from the rest of the world, and still not being happy. But unlike vampires, we have good reasons to be depressed. Almost everything we have gained is shallow -- sweet food, flashy colors, comfortable temperatures, dizzying speed -- while what we have lost is deep: a minute-to-minute life in which our actions arise from the aliveness inside us, and the sense that we're equal participants in a story that we believe in.
Or maybe we're seeing the future: If biotech survives the ongoing collapse, which seems likely, then we may see cures for aging, and for most fatal diseases, in this century. I see only two ways to make this work: if everybody gets immortality technology, suicide will have to be the most common cause of death; but if too many people actually enjoy living thousands of years, the technology will have to be restricted to a small elite.
April 8. Three good collapse posts. In The Twilight of the Machine, John Michael Greer explains in detail why we're going to have to shift from machine labor to human labor, and concludes that we need to focus on learning skills and building simple tools.
In The Simplification of Complex Societies, John Robb suggests that we may be able to avoid a painful drop in complexity by shifting from one complex system to another, through resilient communities, which will grow at the edges of the old system.
Finally, in Refactoring Civilization, Adam Feuer gives a bunch of examples of innovations to smoothly reduce complexity.
I'm thinking about the highly complex technologies that I use most frequently: computer, operating system, internet, automobile. All four of these are getting rapidly more complex, and if any of them are going to survive an overall drop in complexity, someone needs to make a new model that is less complex, and easier to manufacture and maintain, than the old model. No one is doing this. A few years ago I switched from Windows to the simpler Puppy Linux, but Linux is still being forced to become more complex to keep up with the increasing complexity of computers and the internet.
I think computers and the internet are going down. And I won't change my mind until I see new computers and new ways of connecting them that are simpler and more resilient than the ones we have now. I think cars are going down, and I won't change my mind until I see a new car with wheels and suspension designed for potholed roads, that any competent mechanic can fix in a garage with locally made parts.
These innovations are possible in theory, but I don't expect them. I expect cars and computers to become less and less reliable, and slowly withdraw to the wealthiest areas -- just like the government. And think of all the other things that depend on cars and trucks and computers. As I wrote yesterday, our physical infrastructure is so complex that it's not realistic for every part of every system to be manufactured locally. A region that can neither make a component, nor have it shipped in, will eventually lose everything that depends on that component.
I'm optimistic -- I think we will innovate our way through this, but these innovations will be growing through the cracks of the old system, rather than trying to fix it.
April 12. I've been thinking more about Anne's provocatively pessimistic statement (in this post) that without any tech crash, just a financial crash will have us all standing in line for coal mining jobs. If we ask why, we open a deep hole that leads to the enclosure movement, massacres of Indians, and every repressive system in history.
For any system to control you, it must stand between your work and your food. I know there are other needs like shelter and water and warmth, but in most regions, food is the big one. In a forager hunter tribe, or a family of subsistence farmers, your work directly creates your food. You might be poor, but you're free. In industrial civilization, you probably have a job that has nothing to do with producing food, where if you challenge your superiors, you'll be fired, and no longer receive the tokens that are required for food and shelter. You might be surrounded by dazzling technology and comfort, but you are owned.
Now, if this system collapses, you're free but you're hungry; your need for food, and your ability to work, are like two poles of a battery. If you can't connect them yourself, you need something to connect them for you, a social machine that can use your work and give you food. This could be a nice community farm, a crime gang, or a new complex domination system that's worse than the old one.
I'd like to imagine a new complex system that is much better. We can tell wonderful stories about a gift economy information utopia, but at some point we have to ask: where does the food come from? Is it grown by slaves? Suppose it's grown by free people -- and I don't mean free in the watered-down American sense, but economically free, where they could easily not work for anyone but themselves, but they choose to grow extra food because they get something in exchange. What do they get? Lots of money? Which they then use to hire farm workers who are not economically free? And then, when the people who do the actual work want to own the means of production, they have a revolution? We've been through that, and I fear we're going to keep going through it again and again.
I can see only one way to have a non-repressive society of any size. Every person has to have the ability, whether or not they use it, to connect their work (or the work of their close friends and family) directly to their food (and also shelter). And on top of that foundation, if we want universities and airplanes and computers, those functions are bought by autonomous food producers with surplus food.
I touched on this a few years ago in a post on Malthus: "How can we have a dense population center that does not grow all its own food, but does not deplete the land that its food comes from? The answer is simple: the people in the city must not own the land, or otherwise control it." An unsustainable city owns the farmers around it, and a sustainable city is owned by the farmers around it. So the question is not, "What do we give the farmers to make them feed us?" It's, "What non-food jobs do we farmers want to create?"
April 20. Last week I mentioned Kevin Kelly's piece on The Expansion of Ignorance. Kelly finds exponential increases in "information", measured by web pages, and "knowledge", measured by patent applications and scientific articles. But then he points out that answers create new questions, so what we don't know (or more precisely, what we know we don't know) is increasing exponentially faster than what we know. Terence McKenna said it best: "The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
But there's a deeper question that Kelly doesn't ask. What exactly is information? The most charitable answer is that information is the expansion of our consciousness into the fabric of reality itself. The least charitable answer is that information is lies: stories that our detached rational brain tells itself to make sense of experience.
This is basically what Dmitry Orlov argues in The Great Unreasoning: that when we map our systems of thought onto reality, we always crash and burn; and this is not because our systems of thought have not yet been perfected, but because "the exercise of our ability to think can reach the point of diminishing, then negative, returns." And "the human propensity for abstract reasoning is a defect of breeding that leads to collective insanity."
I touched on some of these issues in
The Age of Batshit Crazy Machines. The information explosion claims to be taking us outward, but it's mostly taking us inward. This is the same point that Jerry Mander made in In The Absence of the Sacred: that our technological progress is not evolution but inbreeding. Most of the bits flowing around the internet are games or porn. Most of our technology is being used to cut us off from the world around us, rather than help us face it.
How much of this is built into the technologies themselves, and how much is in how we decide to use them? If we do choose to turn our attention outward, what is the best way to do so? Clearly we can use rational thought to see the limits of rational thought, but how do we go beyond those limits?