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 30. Via Global Guerrillas, I just now found this David Graeber article from last summer, Debt: the first five thousand years. I don't understand all of it. Graeber also wrote a good short book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (PDF link).
Also, here's a thoughtful post about Catholic pedophilia. Basically, because the church lumps together all sex as evil, they attract pedophiles, because taking a vow of celibacy and occasionally molesting children seems more pure than having lots of consensual sex with adults.
The idea that mastery of a sexual life might be what guards against the trends that end in sexual abuse of children is so far from their comprehension that I hold little hope of their arriving at a position of moral wisdom on this subject...
April 29. (permalink) Commenting on yesterday's link about information theory, a European reader, who asks to be called Yiedyie, looked at Vedral's book and sent me a bunch of deep thoughts, from which I extracted a few insights.
First, in the philosophical sense, I am not a materialist but an idealist. I think mind is the fundamental reality, and matter is something that mind creates, for reasons we can only guess. Another way to think of it is that reality itself is like a dream, but when many perspectives share a dream, they need a set of rules, and these rules appear to us as matter and energy.
This explains a lot of phenomena that defy materialism, and it erases the "hard problem of consciousness". But it raises new questions, like: if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there, does it even make sense to talk about it? Or: when astronauts first saw the far side of the moon, was the landscape just then created, and if so, by whom?
These questions force us to accept that the conscious human mind is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the mind or minds creating the physical world. To put it another way: if you are a solipsist, and you think the entire universe is your dream, then you must have a massive subconscious mind to generate and manage it all.
This leads to one of Yiedyie's thoughts. Quoting Gregory Bateson: "No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels." So the high tech information explosion is not creating new information, but is bringing information from subconscious levels, where we were dealing with it just fine, to the conscious level, where it overwhelms the feeble processing power of our rational minds, and leaves us distracted and confused.
Next, getting deeper: what is entropy? Here's an article on the new theory that gravity emerges from information and entropy. It's only a small step from the idea that information is the root of reality, to the idea that mind is the root of reality. And this provides an easy answer to a hard question: if the whole universe is winding down, how did it get wound up in the first place? I once read a speculation that the Big Bang was a massive spike of negative entropy in the quantum whatever. Put this in metaphysical terms, and a system is wound up in the first place by a pure act of will, when mind chooses to condense itself into matter and energy.
But here's the kicker: that means entropy is matter turning back into mind. This reminds me of my 2007 post on entropy, with this amazing comment from Joel:
I heard a fun lecture by Freeman Dyson a few years ago, in which he refuted the notion of a "heat death" of the universe due to the spread of entropy. As the last stars cool down and space warms up, there will be less energy available, but in his calculations this would never slow down the pace of adaptation enough to cause a universal extinction, even as the whole system approaches equilibrium.
...
I really like the second law from an aesthetic point of view, because of my view of entropy. A good professor of mine said he was annoyed by people who thought of entropy as disorder; a better word for it is fluidity, or maybe unpredictability. To me, the second law says that a system will continue to become more amenable to change, have more variety, and be less easy to predict, if left to its own devices.
April 29. Ethan asks: "What is your usual sleep schedule? Also, what do you do to increase sleep quality?"
I think early morning is the best time to do anything, including sleeping. So between sunrise and late morning, I get about four hours of bliss, repeatedly waking up and going back to sleep. I usually go to bed around midnight, and sleep heavily until sunrise. Some things that will give me trouble sleeping at night: going to bed early, napping during the day, reading something late at night that gets me worked up, or eating too much, especially cheese, which will make my body overheat to burn off the extra calories.
April 28. Some links. The Onion nails it: Obama Promoted To Senior Vice President Of American Affairs.
Deadly New Russian Weapon Hides In Shipping Container, "giving any merchant vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier."
Last week I mentioned that we don't have a good definition of the word "information". Then I found out that physicist Vlatko Vedral has made a mathematical definition of information, which has to do with the unlikeliness of the event. So, is this definition the same thing that techno-utopians are talking about, with their information explosion? I don't know.
April 27. A few months ago I did a post about the illuminated thread: Brett is bicycling around the USA taking photos and videos, mostly of industrial sites. He has just finished stage three.
April 27. Still busy. Alexa sends a good blog that I've probably seen before and forgotten about: Little Blog In The Big Woods. Part way down the page there's an interesting post about the history of China, and farther down I see that he has a much better digital camera than I do.
April 25. New landblog post about the latest project. I'm probably going up again today or tomorrow. By the way, both Raintree and Burnt Ridge nurseries are more than three weeks late shipping my plants, and Raintree canceled my Arctic Jay nectarine. But it doesn't do any good for me to criticize them, because the reason they're doing such a bad job is that they're overwhelmed with customers.
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?"