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
May 4. (permalink) Again on the subject of technological complexity: Wind turbines without gears are lighter, cheaper, more reliable. This is because they're simpler, with half as many moving parts, and permanent magnets instead of electromagnets in the generators. Engineers love to make this kind of innovation, and it's exactly what we need to smooth the ongoing collapse. If energy producers know how to simplify while preserving function, it's a good sign that the energy crash will not be catastrophic. But...
When was the last time you saw this kind of innovation in a consumer product? Can you imagine the next generation Ford F-series or Toyota Camry being smaller and cheaper with only half as many parts? The first Apple II could be taken apart without tools, and came with a schematic of the entire circuitry. What would it take for Apple to go back to that?
The deeper issue here is that consumers are powerless. Or, humans have fallen into a powerless role that we call being a "consumer". We have forgotten how to produce or create anything, except as part of a giant machine that eats the Earth to generate garbage and control. In this economic context, any business that empowers us erodes its own profit base. Apple built a great reputation by giving us participation in power, but its stock didn't take off until it took away our power and gave us toys.
But this economic context is not normal. I remember a saying from the late 90's tech bubble, and nothing so stupid has ever been mistaken for wisdom: "What doesn't grow, dies." It's true that what doesn't adapt dies, but getting bigger is a bad way to adapt, because it makes future adaptations more and more difficult.
So, today's big companies that make consumer products will mostly die out with the consumption paradigm, and the adaptations will be made by small new systems. What will those adaptations be? In the next age, the goal of a business will not be to enable investors to increase their money by doing nothing, but to enable customers to improve their lives by doing autonomous work. There are already businesses selling shovels and canning jars and tractor clutches. But if advanced technologies can be taken apart by users, the next step is to make the parts and let users put them together in different ways. Here's a related John Robb post, Modular Tools for Resilient Communities. And the next step is to just make the instructions for making the parts, and the next step after that is to give the instructions away free.
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. 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.