Ran Prieur

December 18.

2010-12-18T12:31:10Z

December 18. Stray links: The other day when I mentioned that modern ruins photos rarely show green stuff coming back, several readers sent me examples, and the best (thanks Art) was this page of feral houses.

From Low-tech Magazine, a well-researched article about Hand powered drilling tools and machines. Basically the golden age was the late 19th century. There's a bit of info about hand drills being made now. The best source I know is Lee Valley Tools. Here's the Lee Valley hand drill page, where you can get hand braces and a European-made double pinion hand drill.

By Wes Jackson, a nice pdf article about agriculture, with lots of good bits: "A ten-year-old today has been alive for one quarter of all the oil ever burned." And "our institutions are all predicated on poor people, empty land, rich." But now we're rich people packed onto poor land and we need to change our perspective. Jackson's conclusion is that agriculture has to shift, globally, from annuals to perennials.

Finally, (via the permies.com forums) Dr. Mellanby's tooth decay reversal diet. Basically you avoid grains and take vitamin D. I'm wondering if using sprouted and soured grains will reduce phytic acid enough to have the same benefit.

December 17.

2010-12-17T12:05:58Z

December 17. I have a large backlog of stuff to post, so I want to try to tie off this week's line of thinking by going somewhere even more depressing.

We all like to think that humans will eventually become fully "awake" (although I don't like that metaphor). But Zack mentions Peter Wessel Zapffe and his essay The Last Messiah. Basically Zappfe argues that the human brain is a case of evolutionary overshoot, like the massive horns of an extinct species of deer, and in the same way it will inevitably drive us to extinction. We have only survived this far by repressing our consciousness, by making ourselves stupid. So, think of your favorite variety of stupid people, and Zappfe would say that they're just doing what humans must do to survive. We are walking the edge of a knife, where one side is pain and death through lack of awareness, and the other is pain and death through too much awareness!

That's not my position, but I think it's worth mentioning. Related: Loren Eiseley's Man of the Future, about the extinct giant-brained Boskop people. Most archaeologists now think this was based on bad science, but again, worth mentioning.

December 17.

2010-12-17T12:23:55Z

December 17. Thanks Dustin for noticing that the soil and health library also has this nice Ralph Borsodi interview. Notice that it's from 1974, that Borsodi had already been saying this stuff for 50 years, and that people who have never heard of Borsodi are coming up with the same ideas now and thinking they're new: that our civilization is unsustainable, that we have to go back to the land, that we should build communities instead of trying to be self-sufficient in isolation, that we should shift to solar and wind energy, that "instead of waiting for a crash to drive us to a better way of living, we should... develop that sort of living before the coming collapse takes place."

It makes me think there's nothing new under the sun, and never will be: that in 100, 1000, 10,000 years, there will still be repressive systems muddling along, going through "crashes" and "recoveries" that are just shifts between suffocating central control and the random violence of gang rule, while a few people in every generation fight the ruling system and get crushed, or build alternatives that eventually get sucked back in.

Repressive systems are not planned by shadowy elites. The elites are just feeding on them, like vultures on a carcass. The deadness on which they feed is the deadness of human attention: the vast majority of humans go through life on autopilot. If you manage to stay off autopilot, you have a good chance to thrive in any age. Then, whatever you build, the people who come after you will mess it up. To try to build Utopia, a system in which everyone can be on autopilot and still thrive, is foolishness. But if everyone is paying attention, Utopia is inevitable.

Connect the dots: Bill sends this Edge of Grace post from 2006, with some quotes by Jacques Ellul on propaganda.

December 15.

2010-12-15T12:26:23Z

December 15. I've had a bunch of reader comments on Monday's post. But first, the word "technology" is confusing. Is there a name for the logical fallacy where we use the same word for a bunch of different things, and we think they're all the same thing because we use the same word? "Technology" is like that. It doesn't make any sense to talk about "technology" in general, only particular technologies and ways of using them.

So, Ashley makes an important distinction between tools that do things that we could do for ourselves, and tools that do things we can't do. Airplanes are great because otherwise we can't fly, but escalators are silly because people in wheelchairs can't use them, so they're mostly used by people who can walk up stairs but are too lazy.

But once we start using escalators and elevators, we're tempted to make a multi-level city where we're going up and down so much that only the fittest people can use the stairs. Then we need escalators. So this is another question we can ask to evaluate a technology: does it create systemic dependence? The best example here is the automobile -- but only if most people have them. Then the effect is to turn every city into a sprawling wasteland of pavement where it's almost impossible to live without a car.

Ivan Illich wrote more about this, and I've made a page out of Illich's critique of cars. More generally, we can evaluate any technology by asking whether it's allied to autonomy or domination. For example, both solar energy and bicycles are compatible with distributed, bottom-up political power, while nuclear energy and trains require strong central control.

I've said this many times, but this is what the Luddites were really about. They were not anti-technology -- they just noticed that the economy was shifting from autonomous home industry to centrally controlled factory industry, and that this change was turning us all into powerless drones. Later, after we all became drones, this system would justify itself by giving us more and more toys. Soon the family would follow the same model: giving the kids no attention except controlling attention, and lots of toys to make up for having no freedom. Merry Christmas!

Finally, Greg mentions a book I've never heard of, This Ugly Civilization by Ralph Borsodi. The link goes to the book online at the Soil and Health Library, and here's Borsodi on Wikipedia. He was a big social thinker and back-to-the-land guru in the early 20th century. And he makes a surprising distinction between the factory, which is bad, and the machine, which can be good. Related: a Kevin Carson pdf article I've linked to before, arguing that back in the late 1800's it became more efficient to do manufacturing in an autonomous network of home industries, and that the corporate system has only been delaying the inevitable next shift.

December 13, late.

2010-12-13T12:06:49Z

December 13, late. This morning I got carried away by cynicism. I mean, after reading about a computer program to take the place of the development of self control in people addicted to computers, who wouldn't foresee human extinction? But when I think about it more carefully, late medieval Europeans had a much wider range of useful skills than forager-hunters. It's only in the richest economies, and only in the last few decades, that we see abominations like pre-grated cheese and escalators. If the ongoing collapse goes fast enough, there may be only one or two lost generations, and their kids will rediscover how to skin a raccoon and fix an engine (two skills I lack myself). As for human evolution, if we ever "evolve" out of having fingernails, we're toast. But we might also use biotech to give ourselves stronger bones, or the ability to digest grass. We might use neurofeedback to become meditation masters, and to learn skills that now seem to us like magic.

(I've edited the permalink to add some of this post and remove some of the doom.)

December 13.

2010-12-13T12:14:24Z

December 13. (permalink) Thoughtful article about how technology is making kids stupid. The author raises the possibility that humans are just shifting to a new kind of intelligence. But then when she examines how exactly our brains are changing, it's scary. Basically, computerland is designed to be so easy and fun that we lose the ability to do anything difficult:

Teens, Nielsen Norman has found, are actually less equipped to make sense of the Internet world than their elders: They don't have the reading ability, patience or research skills to successfully complete what they set out to do online.

This reminds me of a bit in that PBS Rock and Roll documentary. The band New Order made some important electronic music, and later another band got their hands on the same mixing board that New Order had used. They thought the mixer would allow them to effortlessly make great music, but it turned out to be unusually difficult to use!

Yes, human achievement comes from being challenged, not from being coddled, and we are using technology to coddle ourselves. Scott Adams wrote that the holodeck will be our last invention, but this is not something in the future -- it is happening right now.

Related: GPS navigators may be eroding your brain. Also related: if you don't have the self control to stay off the internet, there's a new program called SelfControl that will control yourself for you!

I'm thinking humans are doomed. Right now, on the whole, we're still pretty tough and adaptable. But ever since the invention of fire and stone tools, we've been outsourcing more and more of our skills to our tools, while our inner strength fades. There are collapses that briefly reverse this trend, but then it picks itself up and continues. Inevitably, we'll turn our whole species into feeble lumps of flesh, and the next collapse will be the last. Related: The Machine Stops.

December 12.

2010-12-12T12:58:53Z

December 12. I've had two readers (both named Michael) answer yesterday's question about newer games that work like Asteroids. So far we've got Dwarf Fortress, Snood, and if you count death and respawning as being killed, survival mode Minecraft and almost any MMORPG. Also Michael thinks, and I agree, that Asteroids was beatable by accident, because they ran out of CPU power to render more asteroids beyond a certain level. An arcade game would never be intentionally designed so one quarter could last 17 hours. But there's no reason to avoid that on a home computer.

December 11.

2010-12-11T12:41:01Z

December 11. Unrelated scraps. First, a link: I just discovered there is a fringe science subreddit, although nothing has been posted there for a month.

And a comment: a reader just sent me a gallery of "urban decay" photos, and it occurs to me that you almost never see images of modern ruins with green stuff growing through the cracks. The photographers seem to purposely go in winter when everything is brown and dead looking. I think there's a taboo! If the ruins are bleak and lifeless, then human civilization is the only game in town, and we have to bring back all the seamless buildings and pavement. But if there's green stuff growing through the cracks, then the collapse of our civilization is not such a bad thing, and might even be an improvement.

And a question: some of you remember the classic Asteroids arcade game. The great thing about it was that if you got good enough, you could keep playing as long as you wanted. I'm wondering, other than an Asteroids emulator, is there any game like that now? To be more precise: a computer game where 1) the goal is to continue playing, 2) an unskilled player will inevitably be killed, and 3) a skilled player can keep playing indefinitely. If there are no games like that now, why not?

December 10.

2010-12-10T12:36:20Z

December 10. By popular demand, here's a permalink for yesterday's post.

December 9.

2010-12-09T12:40:45Z

December 9. Consider the myth of Julian Assange. We don't know the reality. Maybe he's a megalomaniac, a creepy guy who sneaks condoms off during sex, and he hasn't done any of the real work for WikiLeaks, which anyway is being played by some intelligence agency. Or not. But myth doesn't care. Here's a reddit thread about how Assange is like a James Bond villain. My favorite comment:

Oh man this remind me of 'Leak hard 2' movie! The bad guy is a web terrorist that hold himself in nuclear bunker. He is brainwashing net people into anarchist and try to topple the capitalism! Not only that, he also hire pirate and b-tard to guard his base! I still remember the last scene where the terrorist hold a remote that will spread poisonus data file to internet. To bad i dont remember the ending......

And over email, Anton writes:

Not only are Assange and Wikileaks doing great stuff for the world, but they are also real-life comic book characters. Assange is a bleached-hair hacker who brazenly attacks the global power structure, stashes computer servers in former bomb shelters, has a network of global contacts...

Also, he has a really cool name. Suppose the leaks continue, and the leaks are popularly seen to contribute to America's decline as a world power. How will they think of Julian Assange in 100 years, or 1000 years? His myth has the potential to be like Robin Hood, if Robin Hood had brought down the Roman Empire. Or he might fade into the background as the Empire takes even bigger blows from somewhere else.

If they make a movie about Assange, the most interesting character will be Obama. He also wanted to change the world by empowering people from the bottom up, but his fatal mistake was working within the system. It's popular to blame Obama personally for the decisions that pass through his office, but I think a file clerk has more autonomy, more room to bend the job description, than the president of the United States. The farther you go up the hierarchy, the more you must obey the logic of the hierarchy itself. I wonder if Obama fantasizes about being Assange, and yet, is required to crush him.

December 8.

2010-12-08T12:14:31Z

December 8. Nice new post by Anne about street medics.

December 7.

2010-12-07T12:12:50Z

December 7. (permalink) Scientists have found evidence that the universe may have existed for ever. How long is that? The dominant theory says the universe is around 14 billion years old. A billion years is a one with nine zeroes after it. You can fit nine zeroes in an inch. If you're waiting for something unlikely, and you need more time, you can stick another zero on and you've got ten times as long. Suppose you need to wait a really long time, so you keep adding zero after zero, each one multiplying your time by ten, until you've got a string of zeroes that goes all the way around the Earth. Now, how much of eternity is that? It's none of eternity.

How long will it take for a planet pretty much the same as this one to exist again? Enough years to put zeroes around the Earth? How about an entire universe exactly like this one? Enough zeroes to go all the way around the universe 100 times? No problem! You're still at zero percent of eternity. It follows that a universe exactly like this one has already existed, and will exist again, an infinite number of times. If you also accept physical determinism, it means that in between any two iterations of this universe, all the same things will happen, in a very long cycle.

Even if you don't accept determinism, it doesn't mean that anything you can imagine will happen given infinite time. Most of the things you can imagine are not possible. No matter how long you twist a Rubik's cube, you can't make all the sides red. Sadly, there will never be a world exactly like Middle Earth, or the Legend of Zelda games, or Firefly. But there might be something reasonably close. And through virtual reality, which is getting better very fast right now, you can at least have the lonely experience of anything you can imagine. Shared experience is trickier, since all the participants have to agree on the world.

Suppose we are already in a sub-world. Personally, I think mind is the fundamental reality, and matter is like an exchange medium, or a set of rules, that comes into being when a bunch of perspectives try to share the same world. Matter is what the inertia of consensus of a shared mind-world looks like. So in that case, what is the eternal physical universe? Maybe it's like a database, a set of all possible worlds, into which any perspective, from outside time and space, can move.

This raises many more questions, but at this point I'd rather stop thinking and watch this video: That's About the Size.

December 6.

2010-12-06T12:28:30Z

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.

2010-12-05T12:41:45Z

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.

2010-12-04T12:07:24Z

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.

2010-12-03T12:36:40Z

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.

2010-12-02T12:28:18Z

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.

2010-11-30T12:42:21Z

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.

2010-11-29T12:36:26Z

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.

2010-11-26T12:14:04Z

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.

2010-11-26T12:21:29Z

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.

2010-11-25T12:10:27Z

November 25. 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.