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 23. I'm not feeling smart today. If anyone wants to do heavy thinking on technology and collapse, read through the last few weeks on The Archdruid Report and Early Warning. Personally, for reasons I mentioned the other day, I think computers and robots are most likely a dead end. The real action is in biology. From the techno-utopian angle, a reader suggests that DIY biotech could produce humans who can live on wood pulp. From the disaster angle, of course, biotech has even more potential. And don't underestimate low-tech biology. Check this out: Deadly airborne fungus in Oregon set to spread.
April 22. Anne comments on yesterday's Disaster Utopianism link:
I was in Haiti with the relief effort. I agree wholeheartedly with the review of Solnit's book. It's a truism that in a disaster you have to work harder to keep well-meaning but unskilled people from hurting themselves trying to help, than you ever have to work to keep the survivors from hurting each other trying to steal or rape. We had a saying that went around the rescue workers, usually said to newbies on their first encounter with a corpse:
"The three myths of a disaster are that the dead bodies will kill you, the survivors will kill you, and the men with guns are there to help."
A second observation is that there are always gangsters, and the crimes they were putting together in Haiti were much better organized than the "looting" and "rioting" you saw on the news. Plenty of kingpins and would-be warlords used the earthquake to arrange dubious contracts, ensnare debtors, attract followers and jockey for position in what remained of the political infrastructure.
April 21. George Monbiot joins the doom party, writing about the coming solar storm and Joseph Tainter's complexity-based theory of collapse.
Also, last week Jeff Vail made a major new post, Envisioning a Hamlet Economy. Something Jeff understands, but some of the commenters don't, is that we have no power over anyone else, nor should we; so actually getting to an envisioned society from here requires immense patience. We might have to keep kicking some of these ideas around for hundreds of years before finding an opening to try them, and by then, new circumstances will have led to new ideas that we can't even imagine now.
And one more great article, loosely related to both of the above: Disaster Utopianism. Contrary to popular myth, crowds are rational, people remain calm in disasters, and big disruptions are big opportunities for both repression and autonomy.
April 20. (permalink) 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, in the quote at the top of this page.
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?
April 19. Brand new Oil Drum post: Excerpts from Energy, Growth, and Sustainability by Steve Sorrel. My summary of their summary: without constant increases in energy, we can't continue economic growth, and without economic growth, we can't have a debt-based money system. I wrote more about this subject back in October 2008 in three consecutive posts, beginning with this short one on how the money economy is created by ravaging nature and the gift economy. The third post concludes by predicting hyperinflation, but Ian has studied this subject much more deeply than I have, and he thinks the near-term trend will be deflation.
Also, here's another collapse-related post by John Robb, with a local-global collapse theory that I've never seen before: "The need for evolutionary advances at the local level will always outstrip the pace of evolutionary change at the center." So the only solution is to have systems that are not controlled from the center.
April 19. More land stuff, but no landblog post until I get the present project done. And when my trees finally come, I'll have to take a break from everything else to rush up there and plant them. Given the mild winter, both Raintree and Burnt Ridge should have shipped two weeks ago, while Prairie Moon not only shipped at the right time, but is the only nursery to ever send me tracking info.
Anyway, I've just added the Journey to Forever Small Farms Library to the land links page (thanks Chris). And from the same site as the rocket mass heater page I linked to the other day, here's a long page on different ways of raising chickens. Summary: factory farms are awful, coop-and-run and chicken tractor are pretty good but kill down the vegetation and bugs too far, truly free range is bad because the birds ruin stuff and poop everywhere, pastured pens (or fast-moving chicken tractors) are good but lots of work, and the best system is to rotate them through four or more fenced paddocks.
April 17. Up at the land until Sunday night. Here are a couple articles from the Guardian about the ash in Europe: Volcanic ash: why it's bad for planes and Flight ban could leave UK short of fruit and veg. Something to think about: when does a breakdown cause a cascading series of breakdowns, and when does it motivate people to make systems more resilient?
April 16. With outdoor work picking up, it looks like I'm not going to get to any deep thinking posts until next week. But here are two more links from readers that I've added to the land links: a page on rocket mass heaters, and a ten page article on building a wood-fired outdoor masonry oven.
April 16. After several comments on the tent problem, I've just posted a clarification on the landblog. Also I've posted a bit more info about kiwis.
April 15. Here's that new landblog post, about how I ended up attaching the wall tent to the platform. One more thing: I mention possibly keeping mosquitoes out by sealing the whole gap with industrial strength velcro tape. It has a waterproof adhesive that sticks to wood, and enough tape to do the job would cost about $80. If anyone has a better idea, I'm open to advice. ranprieur and the domain is gmail.
April 14. The other day Myra Eddy wondered about my standards for what I choose to link to, and guessed, "You only post what you think is worth your readers knowing about." Heh. If that was my standard, I would post thousands of links a day until I collapsed from exhaustion. Instead, it's something like this: new ideas that make me jump out of my seat, or important old ideas presented really well, minus anything that would create too much work for me, plus whatever I feel like.
Anyway, here are some more links. In the jump out of my seat category, Anne sends Design For the First World, a completely serious page where third world people try to solve first world problems.
In an update on a previous jump out of my seat topic, the Atlas of True Names is continuing to add new maps, including a 28x40 inch map of the USA. If you don't live in the Isles of the Tattooed, they're pretty expensive, so I'm hoping they get popular enough that I can eventually buy one at the local map shop here in Children of the Sun.
In a good explanation of old ideas, Sharon Astyk writes about the future of the extended family, and all the benefits of adult kids living with their parents, or old people moving in with their kids. In the mid-20th century Americans decided this was uncool, but as the ongoing collapse continues we will go back to it, and like it!
Erik explains an emerging idea: what's important about Gobekli Tepe, the newly discovered stone temple made 11,000 years ago by hunter-gatherers.
Finally, I don't know which is worse: did none of you ever tell me about Stuart Staniford's blog, Early Warning? Or did someone tell me and I didn't notice? Or maybe it has only recently gotten good. But it is very, very good. Staniford writes about energy and collapse issues, and he's so clear-headed that he makes the rest of us look like Alex Jones. There's one of his posts in particular that I'll write more about later.
April 13, late. I have one more comment on yesterday's subject. It may or may not be possible for us to make a stable and non-repressive large complex society. But if it's impossible, then we're fucked, because it's certainly impossible to hold the entire world at the level of hunter-gatherer tribes and permaculture villages. I wrote more about this in Beyond Civilized and Primitive.
April 13. I'm up at the land today, but last night, after some email comments from Danny (here's his blog), I drafted a few more thoughts on yesterday's subject. 1) By what mechanism could farmers trade food for aircraft, other than the bad systems that have already been tried? I hope nobody assumes it's impossible because a lone blogger can't figure it out in a day. It's a hard problem, but our species has solved harder ones. 2) I wasn't thinking of 747's, but steampunk airships and ultralights, with new engines and materials that arise from a garage tech renaissance. 3) Remember the Utopian Dictator Fallacy. We don't get to design the world -- we can only surf it. We should be bold and radical in our visions, but realistic in our forecasts, and ready for anything. I think that of all the possible ways for us to build large complex systems, only a small fraction have even been imagined. And if I had to place a bet, I'd say we're going to keep inventing destabilizing technologies, and building and crashing big systems, until we go extinct, or evolve into something we wouldn't recognize as human.
April 12. (permalink) 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 12. Also continuing on last week's subject, Adam has a few more posts, one about wasteful vs helpful social complexity, and one that is more optimistic than me about computers. To be more precise, I think computers and the internet as we know them are going to decline and shrink to the wealthiest areas, while the hobbyist tech stuff is going to fill in the gaps... but not nearly as fast as those gaps are created, and not everywhere. Some regions that now have internet might be disconnected for hundreds of years and not be reconnected until the next scientific paradigm figures out telepathy. Some regions will go from cars to horses and stay there for generations, until the age of anti-gravity scooters or bioengineered giant birds. See, in some ways I'm extremely optimistic! But I also know that this world is full of pain and loss, and there's a big load of it coming round the bend.
April 10, late. Minor new post on landblog.
April 9. Anne adds to yesterday's subject with a post on complexity. She faces the very difficult problem of defining complexity, and argues that social complexity and technological complexity are qualitatively different, and that social simplification is a greater danger.
April 8. (permalink) 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 7. Ugo Bardi, one of the best peak oil writers, covers the return of gravel roads... not because we're short of the material for asphalt, but because we're short of the energy to extract and use it.
Related: Calculating the minimum EROI to support the U.S. transportation system. Also related, from this energy technical reference page: "78% of the oil we use is used for transportation."
It seems that we can absorb quite a big oil crash just by relocalizing... except that our physical infrastructure is so complex that it's not realistic for every part of every system to be manufactured locally. So we can expect some regions to lose some technologies because they can't afford to make the components, or to have them shipped in.
April 6. Check this out! Today's departure from normal temperatures in the USA. If you want to keep checking this, here's the source page: US departure from normal highs on weather.com. Climate change is going to show up in local differences from normal, much more strongly than it shows up in global averages, so I hope scientists somewhere are tracking current weather anomalies compared to past anomalies.
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. The author points out that even in good vampire fiction, "any character who up and says: 'You know what? Being a vampire rules' is immediately a villain."
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 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. So economists 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.
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.