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
June 26. Heading up to the land until midweek, but first I thought of some loose ends on dopamine addiction. At the moment, through porn, games, and drugs, anyone in the industrialized world has the option to slide into unproductive pleasure. Without these technologies, some people can still do this, but only if they have very strong imaginations. In civilized culture, these are the "dreamers", and a few become great artists and philosophers. In primitive culture, these must be the people who become shamans.
Some questions: If you use your own imagination to self-administer dopamine, in what ways does this make you stronger than if you were to do the same thing with external tools? In industrial society, is it better to get pleasure through solitary daydreaming, than through engaging with other people in "useful" activities that are mostly harmful? Has the "real" stuff in our society gone so far astray that imaginary worlds are more real? (This leads to a book-length question of what "real" means, but it has something to do with connection to a larger whole.) Is there anything we get pleasure from anymore, that is beneficial on all levels? And now that everyone can get dopamine-addicted, how do you play the advantage of having a strong imagination?
June 24. A few stray links: The Velluvial Matrix is a graduation speech with the usual graduation speech stuff, but also with a good explanation of how exploding medical costs have been caused by complexity. This adds one more piece to Joseph Tainter's story that societies collapse because they keep adding complexity far past the point of diminishing returns.
A few months ago I linked to this 1906 San Francisco streetcar video. Someone suggested that the beautiful smooth motion of everyone on the streets was too good to be true, and that maybe the whole thing was choreographed. Well, here's another one from Barcelona in 1908. Now, my point is not that the early 1900's were paradise. It's this: if you were to pick one million possible worlds, and look at the way that living creatures move about, modern automobile traffic would be the worst. Related: Ivan Illich on Cars.
And here's an article with some sloppy thinking concealing a good point: Was the Cowardly Lion Just Masturbating Too Much? The real issue here is not sexual release, which is healthy no matter how you get it. The issue is that we are using technology to self-administer dopamine, we are getting better and better at it, and it's ruining us. This is what Scott Adams meant when he said that the holodeck will be our last invention. More generally, I think one of our biggest mistakes as a species is the assumption that satisfaction of desires is a good use of technology.
Update: Anne mentions another article in the same magazine with more details on dopamine and addiction.
June 22, late. Back from the land but not much time. Today John Robb had a really nice collection of links.
June 19. I'm up at the land until Tuesday, and then busy with family stuff for most of next week.
June 18. Loose ends on yesterday's subject. A reader writes:
My professional life is conducted entirely electronically... I have fallen into the energy well where I cannot really do anything physical. The incentive structure is such that it is difficult to crawl out of that well.
I'm guessing a lot of you feel that way. One possible view is that a big ship is sinking, and anyone who is too deep in the ship will find it more and more difficult to get out, and be dragged down with it, while people on the edges have a chance to get in lifeboats or swim away. A more optimistic view is that the incentive structure is changing, and if you're paying attention, you will begin to find it easier to crawl out.
Also, I'd love to be proven wrong about home fabricators. Here's how you can start: Design and manufacture a printer that is built to last for decades, with open source software and an interface designed for easy compatibility with past and future computers. Make it so we can use a variety of common local materials for ink. When I see that, then I'll consider the possibility that we could "print" a bicycle.
One more thing: a reader suggests that writing your thoughts on paper might be somehow more powerful than typing them into a computer. I've always felt like I'm a little smarter when I'm handwriting. I thought it was the computer screen making me stupid, but now I wonder if scribbling on paper might be channeling more of the intelligence of
the body.
June 17. (permalink) Yesterday I saw this reddit comment thread on printers and how they never work right. I live in a house with two printers and I can't get either one to work on either of two operating systems. On my winter tour 18 months ago, everyone I stayed with had a computer, but almost nobody had a working printer. When I want a hardcopy of a google map, I trace it from the screen.
What's going on? I think this is something deeper than incompetence or profiteering, and NiceDay4ASulk is on the right track with the comment that printers are "the bridge between the digital world and the physical world." Maybe this has something to do with entropy: the physical world is like a higher energy state than the virtual world, so it's easy to take a picture of a physical object and put it in a computer, but to go the other way, and turn bits in a computer into a physical object, is extremely difficult.
Some techno-utopians think we're going to have home fabricators, where you can download information and "print" any physical object. But printing text on paper is harder now than it was 20 years ago. As information systems get more complex, and available energy gets lower, we are moving in the opposite direction, copying physical stuff into the digital world, and moving our consciousness there with it.
The problem is that our consciousness is tied to physical bodies that need food and shelter. Where the digital world does not feed us, it starves us, and then starves itself. Or, as I've written before: every sub-world must justify itself in terms of the world that contains it. It would be wonderful if we could use computers to print bacon and glassy metal building blocks, but realistically, if we are using them at all, we will be using them to share information about how to eat cattail roots and build houses out of sand and clay, with our hands.
June 16, late. With the blog dialed down, I'm going to be focusing on stuff that you are not likely to have read elsewhere. Here is a disturbing and important post about how to keep someone with you forever, in a bad way. The summary is that you keep them in a constant state of crisis and hope, but the whole thing is worth reading. There are great insights that can be applied to jobs, relationships, families, and entire cultures.
Next, an inspiring post by a terrible singer who became a very good singer through 15 years of practice. So there's still hope for the Mountain Goats. Seriously, the way this guy feels about singing, I feel about building: I'm really bad at it, but I'm determined to live in a cabin I built myself, and I think it will end up taking about 15 years.
Finally, why have I just now heard of Electric Wizard? Here's a YouTube version of an awesome nine minute instrumental called Mind Transferral.
June 16. New landblog post about putting a faucet on the spring pipe. That wasn't the only thing I did on this trip, but I'll write about the other stuff later.
June 15. Back from the land, going up again on Friday. Again, responses to emails will be brief, and I'll have a landblog post up soon, plus maybe some other stuff. Also, Ian tells me that the way I cut the tree was wrong. I've just poked around, and while a few sources say I did it right, most of them agree with Ian, that the wedge cut, or as loggers confusingly call it, the "face" cut, should go less than halfway through the tree. So I've just deleted that bit, and I think I'll wait for an experienced tree-cutter to visit before I go after the big trees.
June 11. Thanks Reid for telling me about Spencer Wells, a geneticist with a new book that should make the critique of civilization more respectable. Here's this week's Daily Show episode with Wells, and here's the website for his book, Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. I can't tell what his solution is, but it hardly matters. At this point it's too late for our society to voluntarily make the necessary adjustments, so the important thing is that, as we're carried along by involuntary adjustments, we understand why.
On the same subject, I'm seeing some buzz about the Dark Mountain Project. I revised Beyond Civilized and Primitive for publication in Dark Mountain 1, and I support their basic idea, which is that we should work with the ongoing collapse instead of trying to stop it. George Monbiot has critiqued Dark Mountain, but his disagreements were so polite and subtle that it amounted to free publicity. John Michael Greer, who is also in Dark Mountain 1, mentioned it in his latest post, Waiting for the Millennium. Greer is worried that a "revitalization movement" of fanatical utopians might do terrible harm, and he says you can guard against this by telling yourself, "There is no brighter future ahead."
I think he misses the mark, but not by much. Almost everyone reading this has the opportunity to navigate the coming changes into a brighter future. We should all be collapse optimists. What we have to guard against is passive hope, where we think that the future will be better without us having to do anything, and also utopian thinking, where we can make the world better in such a clever way that it will stay good without our descendants having to do anything.
June 10. New landblog post. My writing is likely to be mostly landblog posts until November.
June 4-5. I just finished a famous book that I hadn't read before: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel. The idea is, during the last ice age, an orphaned girl from our human subspecies gets adopted by Neanderthals. On one level, it's a wonderful vision of what it might be like to live in a forager-hunter tribe. But on another level, it's not about that at all. We know almost nothing about Neanderthal culture, and Auel chooses to make them patriarchal and authoritarian: women can't even speak to men without bowing down and asking permission first, and the clan has rigid rules which again and again come into conflict with their human instincts. Now, I'm sure this happens sometimes with primitive people, but it's much more typical of civilized people. And when a freethinking young person challenges a dying orthodoxy, we're not seeing eastern Europe in the ice age, but America in the 1960's, or any fundamentalist culture shifting to one that's more free and open. I wonder if the book is popular in Iran right now.
It also reminded me of Harry Potter: an extremely talented orphan joins an exotic community, learns amazing skills, endures terrible hardships, and repeatedly defeats a jealous villain. And last year when I read The Color of Distance, I didn't realize it was Clan of the Cave Bear on another planet.
For a different and equally interesting view of Neanderthals, here's a short article by Stan Gooch on Neanderthals. There's much more in his book Cities of Dreams. Basically he makes a bunch of "two kinds of people" observations, and lines them up so it looks like humans are torn between our Neanderthal and Cro Magnon natures. He also thinks that the big explosion of creativity 35,000 years ago was from the "hybrid vigour" of the crossbreeding. If you think breeding between Neanderthal and Cro Magnon is interesting, wait until we start genetically engineering ourselves.