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
December 6. Taking a break from all this serious stuff: This weekend I started playing Steambirds: Survival, a brand new flash game. It doesn't seem to mess me up like Gemcraft, and it's lots of fun. It's a turn-based, top-down fighter plane game set in an alternate WWII with lots of crazy experimental aircraft. Here's an October preview by the designer-programmer. So far my favorite plane is the PandaPoet.
December 5. Another comment on WikiLeaks, and probably not the last. Jacob writes:
Are you certain they are on the level? The information they put forth is actually not all that damaging. The question I have seen raised, is whether Wikileaks is actually an Intel Operation designed to manipulate and control information without compromising whichever government is behind them.
I've seen those speculations, and it's too early to rule them out. And I do accept quite a lot of "conspiracy theories" -- just about every popular one that doesn't involve outer space. But I don't follow the conspiracist view of history, in which anything that happens must have been planned that way by evil elites. I think history is like a wild horse that some people can briefly sit on but nobody really rides, and even the most powerful people in the world are not planning, just improvising with a lot of money. So, to accept that any particular event has been secretly planned, I need to see evidence, not just a good story. And I haven't seen any evidence yet on WikiLeaks.
December 4. I want to write again about tactics. Some people are complaining that WikiLeaks is turning the leaks into a circus, instead of simply releasing the info. But the goal of WikiLeaks is not to dispense gossip to the fringes of the internet; it's to weaken the domination system through fear of leaks. So their best move is to make as big a spectacle as possible. If it were up to me, I would distill the leaks down to a few hundred really good ones, get a true random number generator, and begin releasing random links at random intervals of time.
Also, some people are talking about boycotting Amazon for kicking WikiLeaks off their servers. Goddammit, boycotting is not about personal purity -- it's a tactical move to force businesses to change. The correct way to do a boycott is to make a demand, and organize a huge number of people to stop buying until the demand is met. But it only works if the business does better financially by conceding. In this excellent Ethan Zuckerman interview, he speculates that Amazon caved because they feared a Fox News boycott. The hard truth is that Amazon has more customers who would follow an anti-WikiLeaks boycott than a pro-WikiLeaks boycott. So we can all keep getting good deals ordering stuff, but we might be careful using Amazon to host strong content. Zuckerman also has this important insight:
...we perceive the web to be a public space, a place where you should be able to go and set up your soapbox and say whatever you want to say to the world. The truth is, the web is almost entirely privately held... basically, you're holding a political rally in a shopping mall.
So, given this situation, what is our best move? Maybe the best long-term move is to build an internet that is completely independent of corporations and nation-states, including decentralized DNS (whatever that is), microprocessors made in garages, city-wide wireless networks, and long-distance data transfer by short wave radio or carrier pigeon.
In the short term, we need to stop thinking like Sir Lancelot on a high horse, and start thinking like escaped rats in a death machine. We will prevail through cleverness, adaptability, and patience... and it might even be fun.
December 3, late. (permalink) A few more thoughts on Wikileaks. I should have seen immediately that they're not going after Assange to stop the leaks. They're going after him for symbolic reasons, or mythic reasons. He's thumbing his nose at the ruling powers in front of the entire world, and nobody gets away with that. My best guess is he'll get the Timothy Leary treatment: he'll be broken and turned into a much tamer radical, and allowed to live. Although if the sex crime charges stick, that might undermine his value as a martyr and make it a better move to kill him.
Meanwhile, the leaks will continue. This blog post, WikiLeaks on the run, asks a good question: "When does the situation reach equilibrium?" But the answer is a bit optimistic:
It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
That must be what they're discussing behind the scenes in government. And don't miss that this is equally threatening to media. They won't be able to engage in spin rooms and situation rooms, appearances and perception. When we can see the real communiques, that kind of mush won't do.
Oh really? While we're at it, let's set up congress so we see exactly how everyone voted, and also see where their donations came from. Surely that will dissolve the power of big money lobbyists in the golden light of human awareness. Let's make an "information superhighway" where text and pictures and sound can move around the world in seconds. Surely that will bring universal understanding and world peace. Let's invent a magical device that can capture moving pictures and sound in a format that can be spread electronically. Then when just one person sneaks in and films an industrial pig farm, within days everyone in the world will see the video and change their buying habits. Let's put all the great works of literature and millions of scientific articles at our fingertips, and we'll all become scholars and geniuses...
You see what I'm getting at. The information optimists are forgetting the last and most powerful censor: the mind of the information consumer. It is human nature (so far) to believe whatever makes us feel good, and then go looking for the evidence to support it. So the more information we have access to, and the more free we are to browse it, the stupider we get! The spin rooms will be stronger than ever, because with all that data, we will want someone to sort it out for us.
Imagine a world of 100% transparency. There is a camera everywhere, all the time. You can watch Sarah Palin taking a dump or (God forbid) Joe Lieberman having sex. And if Vladimir Putin wants an opponent murdered, what will he do? He'll get right on the phone and order the hit, because he understands that nobody can do anything about it, just as we can't do anything now about all the undisputed facts that Noam Chomsky writes about. At the fringes of the internet a few losers will point fingers, while the great mass of losers point fingers at some guy in Ohio who tortured a cat, some powerless wrongdoer who can be run through the gears of human sacrifice.
So, getting back to tactics, total transparency is the wrong move. If everything is in the open, then nothing is in the open. The correct move is to make it so the functionaries of the targeted system never know when the eyes of the world will be focused on them -- a reverse panopticon! This is roughly what WikiLeaks is already doing, although they have room to do it better.
December 2, late. A few questions on the Swedish rape charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. First, what is he actually being accused of? According to this article, the sex was consensual and he's being charged with not wearing a condom! Second, was he set up? If some spy agency recruited the two women, this would be only a slight variation on the old, old trick of neutralizing dangerous men by luring them into sex.
Third, if he faces the charges, will he go to prison, or possibly be killed once everyone knows where he is? And most important, can Wikileaks be effective without him? If so, and if he was set up, then the ruling powers do not understand networked open-source warfare. And if Wikileaks is crippled without Assange, then they're doing it wrong.
Also, via Global Guerrillas, check out the archive of Julian Assange's blog, written in 2006 and 2007. From December 31, 2006:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
And from a few days later:
If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.
November 30. (permalink) Continuing on the future of food, I'm reading Carol Deppe's new book, The Resilient Gardener. Everyone who grows food has to read this. Deppe has deep experience and understanding, and I'm in awe of her skill as a writer. The book is extremely dense, with new and useful information in almost every sentence, and yet somehow it takes no effort to read it.
Also, she writes about lots of stuff beyond how to grow food, and in the chapter on climate change she describes the Little Ice Age in Europe. Basically everyone was growing grain, which needs stable and warm weather, and the population was stretching the best-case carrying capacity of the land. Then suddenly the climate shifted. In the Great Famine of 1315-1317, extreme rains ruined grain crops for three straight years. But the population didn't just starve down and bounce back -- the whole culture became nastier, there were more wars and murders and disease epidemics, and people lost faith in the ruling systems. The weather remained cold and erratic for centuries, and didn't warm and stabilize until the industrial age (probably because of greenhouse gases).
Meanwhile, farmers made all kinds of innovations: more diversity, more vegetables, root crops, animals, legumes, and perennials, a broader range of useful skills, and wider trading. In episode 6 of Connections, "Thunder in the Skies" (video link), James Burke argues that many other technological events began with the Little Ice Age.
This is my new favorite model for our own collapse. Our agriculture is based on genetically-modified monocultures, which are not really more productive, only better adapted to a stable climate and massive industrial inputs. As these conditions change, there will be food shortages and all the bad things that follow them. There will be deep shocks and partial recoveries, life will get rougher and more chaotic, and yet many of the existing domination systems will survive and become more brutal. At the same time, there will be more cracks, more room to try different things, and many innovations. Over hundreds of years, these will lead to a new civilization that we can't imagine.
(Here's a permalink for today's post, including a rewrite of the last post.)
November 29. Michael makes a terrifying comment on Friday's post: suppose industrial agribusiness is able to replace oil with biofuel! Or maybe they could directly synthesize food with energy gathered from vast solar plants. This brings us to every good human's nightmare, the reason right wingers hate Al Gore and lefties hate Monsanto. We fear a society that is global, repressive, and sustainable: a collapse-proof dystopia. To make it even tighter, let's assume that this system can withstand climate change, and let's ignore Joseph Tainter. Then we would seem to be damned for all time. With industrial agriculture feeding the rich and expanding, the poor would be exterminated or assimilated, and "the rich" would become "everyone", walking behind our solar lawn mowers, doing dreary make-work office jobs, playing video games in which our actions have meaning, and buying food with no seeds that we might save to put the smallest crack in our total enslavement.
At this point we have one card left: psychological sustainability. If we have no autonomy in our jobs, we do them badly; if our society makes life meaningless, we want to bring it down. I think this is the subconscious motive of the Tea Partiers. They have arrived through emotion where the Unabomber arrived through intellect: they hate this world and they want to fuck it up.
There are better ways for human aliveness to break a bad system. But if we fail to break it, there is one scenario that is even worse. If the tech system becomes independent of human choice, but it still needs human existence, then we could be stuck in lives of total confinement and pure horror -- just like the animals in our factory farms right now. And if biotech reverses aging, you might not even escape through death. You could be tortured until the sun burns out -- or with interstellar space colonies, forever.
Now, I don't think this is going to happen. I just want to point out that as long as industrial agribusiness is getting stronger, we are on that path, and one way or another we have to get off it. And alternate paths are not limited to the tiny range of things that have already been tried. We can set the bar much higher, and aim for a world of permaculture food forests, decentralized manufacturing, 100% bottom-up social systems, and global consciousness.
November 26. Continuing on the subject of automated work vs hand work, the other day Stuart Staniford reposted a piece from three years ago: Why Peak Oil Actually Helps Industrial Agriculture. I'm not reading the 432 comments, and maybe someone there already said this, but I don't think his particular points support his general point. Staniford and his "reversalist" opponents could both be right: that peak oil will help industrial agriculture, while the overall trend is toward human-intensive agriculture.
I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that his sub-points are correct: that peak oil will make industrial megafarms more profitable, that they will not spend more on labor, and that the average agribusiness will get bigger. Now, if they're making a higher profit, and they're also paying more for oil (per unit of food), then food will be more expensive. But if it's more expensive, then they will sell less of it, because fewer people will be able to afford it! And if they're selling less food, then they will not be buying up more and more land. Oil-based farming corporations will continue to get bigger by merging, while the total amount of land in oil-based farming is driven down by economics: Above a certain number of acres (which keeps falling), additional acres will grow food for people who can't pay enough to generate profit. Government subsidies will only put a patch on this process, and only as long as governments can afford subsidies.
So if industrial agriculture shifts into feeding the rich, what will the rest of us eat? We will not suddenly become self-sufficient, but gradually buy less and less oil-based food and grow more food ourselves. Maybe you'll be growing beans and squash and buying wheat for sourdough bread and chicken feed. And the people who can neither buy food nor grow it will die off -- most likely not from starvation, but from the many bad things that happen to poor people in a collapsing society before they get around to starving.
Finally, Staniford says "industrial farmers are extremely efficient," but this is only true when you measure efficiency in terms of money, in a world where oil is cheap and human labor is expensive. If you don't have a job, your own labor is free, and if you're growing organically, you don't have to buy oil either. Staniford is correct that small for-profit farms will not out-compete big ones. There will be no competition. Industrial agribusiness will monopolize one niche, which shrinks over time, while gift economy gardeners will monopolize another, which grows.
November 26. Over on reddit, I just got into an interesting discussion on automation that nobody will read if I don't link to it here. Please be nice to the other guy! It's a tangent to an idea I had a few months ago. Techno-utopians imagine a world where machines run themselves and humans don't have to do any work, and today's discussion is about whether we're on that path at all. I don't think we are -- so far, automation has created more work than it has saved. But assuming we do get on a path where fewer and fewer people have to work, when we get halfway there it will break down, because the people who still have to work will resent the people who don't. Or, the most capable people will figure out how to be in the half that doesn't have to work, while the less capable people will be stuck working, and work badly. Maybe this is already happening!
November 25. There are a few Thanksgiving recipes on my
misc page. And here's something poultry-related:
I just read in Acres USA magazine that many "organic" eggs are fake organic, using loopholes or outright violating the already weak animal treatment standards in the USDA organic definition. I already knew that Dean/Horizon does this with cows, so it's not surprising that other companies are doing it with chickens. Here's the Cornucopia Institute organic egg scorecard, which rates 64 brands around the country. It turns out that the Chino Valley eggs I've been buying are among the worst! That might be why they're the only "organic" brand I can get in Spokane for under $5 a dozen. If you go deeper into the report, there's lots more information. For example, the page on Organic Valley reveals that the farmers want to be transparent and maintain high standards, while the management keeps trying to turn evil. Cornucopia has done great work on this issue, and Certified Humane has higher and better-enforced standards than USDA organic.
More generally, I expect the "organic" label to get more weak and watered-down, and all brands with good reputations to eventually degrade their quality. These behaviors arise from human nature: not that we're evil, but that we're lazy thinkers who rely too much on mental shortcuts. And the people who manage the substance behind the label, the territory behind the map, are tempted again and again to profit by letting it slip, because most people won't notice.
November 24. New landblog post, catching up on news about stuff I'm growing.
November 22. Check out today's US departure from normal highs! And it's going to get worse. They're forecasting -19 degrees (-28C) on my land Tuesday night. Despite the leaf mulch, I expect some of my plants to be killed.
I've just added this Cob House Journal to my landblog links page. They built a cob house and photographed every step with short explanations. But why did they build it square? A big advantage of cob is that you can curve the walls into any shape you want, and also the curves add strength. Building a rectilinear cob house is like growing peach trees for firewood.
Also, here's a new Paul Wheaton video with an amazing rocket mass heater innovation. I'm not talking about the under-floor thing, but (starting at 1:08) the bypass valve. First I should explain rocket mass heaters. The "rocket" part is that the draft is created in the combustion chamber, not in the chimney, which means the chimney doesn't have to go vertically straight from the stove to the exit, but can twist and turn horizontally. This enables you to gather and store its heat in a big thermal mass -- the "mass heater" part. Now, the idea here is to put the stovepipe in a big loop, with the combustion and chimney side by side. You do need some chimney draft to start a cold stove, so if you're starting it, or running it in the summer, you can twist the valve and run the exhaust straight up the chimney. Otherwise you run it around the loop.
November 19. Today, bashing America. First, via Global Guerrillas, a brainy analysis of how America's decline is hardwired into its structure. And here's a good Kunstler interview, mostly about how the American collapse might play out. My favorite bit is where he compares Phoenix and Portland.
Lots of people are linking to this: The man who writes your students' papers tells his story. And something similar: US scientists significantly more likely to publish fake research. The ghostwriter bashes the American education system, but I think the dysfunction runs deeper. In Dmitry Orlov's new post, The Limits of Incompetence, he points out that the Dunning-Kruger effect mostly only happens to Americans!
My guess is that this is an almost inevitable result of one nation being much richer than others. Ordinary humans, given too much wealth, will use it to buy themselves and their children the one thing they desire most: disconnection from reality.
November 19. So last night I went down to the discount theater and finally saw Inception. I've just stuck it pretty high on my top films page, and declared it the best written film of all time. And it barely scratches the surface of my favorite potential world-changing technology, (highlight to read spoiler) time-contracted virtual reality, where you experience much more time passing in the sub-world, than passes in the containing world.
November 18. Woo-hoo! I have the top post on AskReddit: If there were an airline with no screening at all, would you fly it?
November 18. Anne has a great new blog, Hunt Gather Study Medicine. There are already a bunch of posts about medical issues, and Anne is carefully non-ideological and raises lots of good questions. Today there's a post on Chinese "barefoot doctors", and I really like the one a few days ago about two hypothetical men with heart problems, under two different medical systems. As the industrial medical system collapses under its unbearable costs, people won't live as long, but we might live better.
Loosely related: last week the NY Times had an interactive piece, You Fix The Budget. It doesn't even give us the option to pull the rug out from under the medical billing industry, or eliminate entitlements for people who don't need them, and yet I'm surprised at how easy it is to balance the budget. Of course, the way I did it is politically impossible, and so are all other ways, except the easiest and most painful way: collapse.
November 17. I want to go back to the addiction and happiness subject. Lorelei points out that there are two different things we call "happiness": happiness in the moment and looking-back happiness, and...
Often these time wasters you refer to really do put me in a better mood. And my REAL unhappiness is that my reflective self is unhappy that I spent my time having "fun" instead of curing cancer. So I wonder, perhaps we would be happier if we weren't future oriented at all.
Believe me, if there were no depressive backlash, I would be playing Gemcraft every day. I'm a future-oriented hedonist: my goal is to maximize good feeling and minimize bad feeling, over the entire span of my life. And it's damn hard to find something that makes me feel good without making me feel bad later. Instead, more and more I find myself doing difficult stuff that makes me feel good later, like meditating or building the hut.
I'm going to plunge into metaphysics and say that net good feeling is maximized by following the invisible flow of the infinite universe, the Tao. And there's no easy way to do this. Our instincts, our emotions, our intellect can all lead us astray.
Worst of all is our culture, which gives us only two bad choices. One is "fun", or short-sighted hedonism, making us feel good now and worse later. The other is "work", which is considered valuable to the extent that it increases the gross domestic product, or replaces what we have found with what we have made. Basically our culture equates "useful" with domination. Even curing cancer is a form of domination, destroying the alien invader, when maybe we should be listening to it.
November 16. New landblog post, in which I do a few more things on the hut.
November 14. Last weekend, to reward myself for roofing the hut, I started playing Gemcraft, a tower defense game programmed in flash. You can download the SWF file and play it in any recent browser. But I don't recommend it! Tower defense games are often called "time wasters", as if it's wrong to spend time doing something fun and unproductive. But the games are actually much worse. Lately I've been meditating a lot, because there's nothing else to do when I'm staying on the land and it's dark fourteen hours a day. So I'm getting better at noticing my own mental states. And Gemcraft totally fucked me up! It's like I repeatedly jammed a screwdriver into the motivation and reward centers in my brain. For days afterward, everything I did in the real world seemed difficult and empty. Life itself became a painful crawl up a mountain. Even now the effect lingers. I crave the game, and can only stop myself from playing by 1) noticing its full effects, 2) being future-oriented, and 3) having strong self-control.
Of course, I must be highly susceptible to computer strategy game addiction (which is fair since I don't even like being drunk). But I'm still wondering how many people are going through their lives with the same effects from other activities they think of as harmless fun. The Buddha was opposed to dice games. How many people are depressed and unmotivated, and would get better if they stopped watching TV, looking at porn, using Facebook, doing crossword puzzles, playing board games, even reading certain books or having certain kinds of conversations? There's even a new study showing that daydreaming makes you unhappy!
Philosophically, I'm an idealist not a materialist: I think the brain exists on the surface of consciousness and not the other way around, and the brain's dopamine system follows deeper laws. And I wonder if the only way to have pleasure, without having more pain later, is to expand your perspective into the world around you. One of the videos I linked to yesterday mentions that through technology, kids are spending more and more time in worlds they have created themselves.
This is not going to end well.
November 13. Yesterday I discovered RSA Animate. Nothing on the internet is more boring than a video of someone giving a speech. But RSA takes the audio from speeches and illustrates them with a very good cartoonist on a dry erase board, so instead of seeing a talking head, you see the ideas come to life. You can also find them on YouTube. I've only watched a few, and my favorites are The Empathic Civilization, The Secret Powers of Time, Changing Education Paradigms, and The surprising truth about what motivates us. I'm sure there are many more good ones, and some lame ones where the cartoonist has to fill in the gaps to keep us watching.
The Empathic Civilization makes a surprising point that I'm not sure I agree with: empathy is based on the suffering of others, so in a world with no suffering, there is no empathy. Also, it shows the expansion of our sense of "tribe" to cover larger and larger groups, and maybe finally the whole biosphere. But it seems like most humans cement their sense of tribe with hatred for the enemy tribe, and if one day we all think of the whole planet as our tribe, then who is the enemy? It reminds me of a Jack Handey line: "Whether they ever find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet."