Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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February 29. Here in Michigan I've had more internet time than anywhere else on the trip, which is good because I'll probably be getting on at the library when I get back to Spokane. So I've had time to do some other projects on this site. First, I've updated the Landblog FAQ to include some stuff about the house and explain better why I'm not homesteading.

And this is a work in progress, but far enough along to post a link: Frugal Early Retirement FAQ. The idea is that a lot of people come to this site because of "How To Drop Out", and they want to know how I'm actually living, but the way I'm living now is better described as frugal early retirement.


February 29. Happy Leap Day! It's a good day for weird stuff, so I've just added a new introduction to my 9/11 FAQ, changing the slant of my position, with a new summary of my metaphysical thinking. Thanks Paula for telling me about the Mitch Hedberg joke, about Bigfoot being intrinsically blurry. Here's another one that's probably more profound than he intended: "You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later."


February 28. Via Hacker News, something completely obvious that is rarely put into words: Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill:

I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.


February 27. Continuing on the urban farm subject, Chris just sent a link about a planned seven acre food forest in Seattle. And Sharon Astyk recently mentioned that a study found 5000 acres of farmable land in New York City. Of course five thousand acres will not feed eight million people, but just the presence of growing food improves quality of life.

There are examples of this in the book I'm currently reading, Farm City by Novella Carpenter. In the Oakland ghetto she has grown fruits and vegetables and raised all kinds of animals. The nice thing about the book is that she's not a very good farmer, and honest about difficulties and failures. Too many writers have the opposite instinct, especially when they're writing about alternative lifestyles: to make everything sound easy and fun and totally fulfilling. This strategy will sell more books, but in the long term it undermines the movement by setting people up for disappointment. I think this is why the hippies failed.

Here's the latest on my trip. Sarah and I will drive to Chicago on Thursday, and I will not have time to meet anyone there other than my hosts. Friday we drive to Cottage Grove outside Minneapolis, and I've tentatively planned an Ethiopian dinner on Sunday before Christopher and I hit the road west. There's a possibility I'll stay in St Paul a few extra days. If anyone in North Dakota or Montana wants to host both of us, let me know. Gmail and the name is ranprieur.


February 25. By popular demand, a guest post on Dmitry Orlov's blog, Notes from the Field, by a guy named Mark who tried going back to the land and found out how difficult it is. As I think more about this, I see three different issues. One is growing food vs not growing food. Of course I'm in favor of growing food, but growing all your own food is unrealistic, and if you're only trying to grow a third of your own food, in some ways it's easier in an urban backyard than in the country -- plus you don't get the intellectual deprivation that Mark mentions. So the second issue is rural vs urban, and I prefer urban, although if you're in the country anyway you should obviously make the best of it by producing food, especially stuff that's forbidden in the city, like cows.

The third issue is rarely mentioned: annual vs perennial. I suspect that almost everyone who complains about the difficulty of farming and gardening is trying to grow annuals. Annual farming is necessary if you're in a new place every year, but if you own property, it's crazy to plant crops year after year, when you could get food every year by planting something once. I look forward to garage biotech inventing squash trees.

I've arrived in Ypsilanti Michigan, my bus pass expires tomorrow, and we're talking about driving to Minnesota on Wednesday or Thursday, with a possible overnight stop in Chicago.


February 23. On the recommendation of a bunch of people, I've just read the novel Daemon by Daniel Suarez, and its sequel FreedomTM. The first half of the first book is the best techno-thriller I've ever read, using technology that already exists to tell an exciting and plausible story in which a genius game designer sets up a powerful artificial intelligence to wreak havoc after his death. As time passes, and the Daemon continues to stay on top of events, instead of veering off through compounding errors of imperfect prediction, the book becomes less plausible, but it also becomes more epic, and briefly achieves moral ambiguity.

Then in the second book Suarez cashes in all his points to buy a utopian preach-fest. The characters become cartoon good and evil, and the story becomes a platform for a Message about Society. Still, the message is correct and timely. Both books are loaded with important ideas, and they are essential reading if you're interested in artificial intelligence, universal surveillance, drone warfare, video game overlays on the physical world, corporation-tribe hybrids, or the role of technology in the conflict between government, big money, and human autonomy.


February 23. On the urban-rural subject, a reader asks: if the city is better, then "what kind of city, and in the city where exactly?" This is a good question, and I'm not going to answer it. It's an example of windbag bait, an opportunity for me to sound wise by saying a bunch of stuff that anyone could figure out for themselves.

But I will say why I picked Spokane: it's close to my land, I like the climate, the people are friendly, the housing is much cheaper than on the coast, and it's relatively safe from disasters. I picked my neighborhood because it's cheap and located well for bicycling. And I picked my house because it was a good value and has good sun exposure for growing food.


February 21. Many people on this tour have asked me why I'm focusing my attention on my house in the city and not homesteading my primitive land. The myth of country living is a powerful motivator, but most people who have tried both country and city living prefer the city, even in the context of industrial collapse. Toby Hemenway wrote two good pieces about this subject, Urban vs Rural Sustainability and Cities, peak oil, and sustainability. I would say, if you have the resources to build a rural community of a hundred people that can supply most of its own food, tools, and energy, that's awesome! If not, you might find yourself living in a remote personal suburb, socially isolated and doing way too much driving. I think hostility to the city and hostility to wild nature often have the same root: fear of chaos.


February 21. Paula has done a post about my stay, including an invitation for other people to visit. She lists some things she learned, and one of the things I learned is that a good air bed with memory foam on top is extremely comfortable, and I might get one for my bedroom at home. I also have to defend myself as not a neat freak! I call myself a Virgo slob, because I carefully optimize the amount of mess for maximum practical value and minimum work. For example, if a task has to be done more or less often, like sweeping the floor or changing my pants, I'll do it less often, waiting until the dirt becomes a problem. But if a task has to be done sooner or later, like washing dishes, I'll do it immediately. Also, it's more efficient to keep my coat on the back of a chair than to put it in the closet, but a second coat on the same chair is not good because it blocks the first.

And if anyone's wondering how to fix a garbage disposal, where the motor works but it's jammed, there's usually a place in the center of the bottom where you can unjam it by turning it with an allen wrench.


February 21. Yesterday Tom gave me and Andrew a tour of a squatter community in St Louis. Among several squatted houses, they have one house that's legally occupied, so people can go there if they get thrown out. We also saw gardens, orchards, compost piles, a chicken coop, and bee hives.


February 20. I arrived yesterday in St Louis after a long and crowded bus ride. I'm starting to burn out on traveling, and having come this far west, was considering just taking the bus home. But I'm still going to try to hit Michigan and Minnesota. Because I'll be using rideshare in Minnesota instead of the bus pass, I might only stay in Minneapolis.


February 18. Game designer Eskil Steenberg is my favorite living thinker. Other people might have more great ideas closer to my own areas of interest, but Steenberg is the only one where I just love to watch him think. Last month he made an epic post, The Pivot model, laying out a detailed theory of what makes a game fun. It might be helpful to apply his model to life, or society. For example, Steenberg observes that a game is more fun with a moderate chance of acceptable failure, and yet look at all the ways that humans try to adjust society, or their own lives, to have zero chance of failure, or a chance of unacceptable failure.


February 17. Travel update: my latest plan is to take a huge nap tomorrow, Paula will drop me off very late at the bus station, and I'll catch the 3:40am bus to St Louis, arriving Sunday afternoon. I have enough time left on my pass to stay in St Louis for almost a week and still get to Ann Arbor to catch a ride to Minnesota, where I'll catch another ride home. As my tour winds down, I'm losing motivation for planning many visits, and want to keep it simple.


February 16. Long-time reader Dermot has finished a project he's been working on for years, a half hour animated peak oil movie called There's No Tomorrow. That link goes to YouTube, and here's the incubate pictures home page with more info.

Update: after watching it, the animation is brilliant, and I haven't seen anything that explains the issues so clearly and concisely.


February 16. Last month I mentioned that library.nu stopped taking new members. Last week it stopped taking logins, and now it's down completely. Here's the story: Book Publishers Shut Down Library.nu and iFile-it. Something I wrote in one of my zines back in 1999:

I imagine the capitalist Armageddon, the war at the end of the world as we know it, where every blade of grass, every molecule of air, every variety of living thing, every action, every bit of information is owned -- or somebody declares ownership of it, and the war is between those who obey these declarations of ownership and those who do not.

This war started before your landlord claimed to "own" where you live; it was already old when the Europeans claimed to "own" the land the Indians were living on. It started when the idea of "own" was invented, and it's going to keep going until everything is owned, before nothing is owned.


February 15. I'm in Pittsburgh staying in an abandoned house. The previous squatter had temporary permission from the owner to squat it, and Paula replaced him. Here's her latest post about learning to appreciate the dropout lifestyle.


February 13. Back in Vermont I met a lot of people who are engaged in some kind of political cause, and I noticed that lefty political causes tend to be defensive. Even if the tactics are offensive, the greater story is: "these bad people are doing this bad thing, and we have to stop them."

In a football game, if one team is always on offense and the other is always on defense, who's going to win? There's a memorable scene in the novel Shantaram, where the narrator is being attacked by wild dogs and fending them off with a steel pipe. He's about to be eaten, until another guy shows up who knows how to fight wild dogs, by wildly swinging a pipe while jumping into the middle of the pack!

I can think of two high-profile political movements where "progressives" are actually walking forward, taking the fight into enemy territory: same-sex marriage and cannabis legalization. It's going to take decades, but I think total victory is inevitable in both.

The Occupy movement is defensive, trying and failing to stop the increasing concentration of wealth and power. Even if they pass a law canceling personal debts, that's only a temporary setback for the giant blocks of money, which will just start building the debts up again. The permanent solution is to build alternate economies which have negative feedback, not positive feedback, in the concentration of wealth. Charles Eisenstein has written a whole book about this, Sacred Economics, and I've written about it briefly in a few posts, including this one on fire and water economies.

To join these new economies, people first have to get out from under the control of the old economy. Basically that means we have to get food and shelter without money. This brings us to a third effective political movement, which is mostly fighting at the local level: occupying vacant properties, changing laws to legalize the occupation of vacant properties, and changing laws to expand urban farming rights.

My present hosts are at the leading edge of this movement in Buffalo, which has the same opportunities that more famously exist in Detroit. They bought this house from the city for a dollar, on the condition that they bring it up to code. Yesterday they showed me an acre of contiguous lots where they're planning to make a farm, across the street from a brick building that they got in exchange for doing a few weeks of work for the owner. They've ordered 23 chickens, and Buffalo has a new lengthy and restrictive chicken ordinance, but the city is on the defensive. I'm curious to see how far we can roll these laws back, if we keep pushing.


February 12. I arrived late last night in Buffalo, and will probably stay until Tuesday. None of my food was confiscated going into Canada and back, but border crossings are just too stressful. I enjoy answering questions about my unusual lifestyle, but not from hostile people in uniforms. So I won't go into Canada again until I have a really good reason.


February 10. In case anyone missed it, the USDA has finally released a new plant hardiness zone map accounting for climate change. (See, there is some benefit to having a Democrat in the White House.) Some people say the 2006 Arbor Day Foundation zone map is better. On both maps, my house and land have moved from zone 5 to zone 6. Now I can grow Orleans Reinette apples!

One more colored chart, from Do The Math: The Alternative Energy Matrix. He gives each energy source a score based on a number of factors. I really like that one of the factors is whether you can do it in your backyard. Solar comes out at the top, fusion at the bottom, and none of them come close to fossil fuels.

Today I'm making an unplanned trip up to Montreal to visit Tim Boucher. I'm terrified of border crossings, and I fear that all my road food will be confiscated. Anyway, if all goes well, I'll stay a night and then spend all day Saturday on the bus to Buffalo.


February 8. Yesterday I almost speculated about how GPS could be used to make us smarter, if the devices did not give instructions, but just showed a zoomable map and let us do our own navigation. Apparently this is already an option. Erik comments:

GPS is a significant learning augment for me. The 'trick' is that I never use turn by turn navigation, but I study the map and find my own way.

This raises a question for techno-utopians: Which world is better, one where technologies are selected and designed so we can only use them to make ourselves stronger, or one where we are free to use technologies to make ourselves weaker? If the latter, what if most people use most technologies in a short-sighted way, so that on the whole, they make life worse? Never mind utopia -- how does this even count as good? I would answer that the freedom to make mistakes eventually makes us stronger, when we learn not to make the mistakes.

Today I'm going to Burlington, then Syracuse on the weekend, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Oddly, Pittsburgh is sort of a Greyhound dead end. It's hard to get anywhere from there without leaving or arriving at a time when you should be sleeping. If someone in Columbus or Indianapolis can pick me up and drop me off at the station, I'll happily stay a night. Otherwise I'll probably take an overnight bus to St Louis, then Chicago if I have time, and end my bus pass in Ann Arbor, where a reader has offered to drive me to Minnesota, and another reader might drive me all the way back, or I'll take the train.


February 7. The other day Hacker News linked to a reddit comment with a brilliant rule for self-improvement: start every day as a producer, not a consumer. From there, I'm thinking about the grey area between producer and consumer, and all the computer games where you are consuming the illusion of being a producer. Producing makes our lives feel meaningful, so why would someone choose fake production over real production? I can think of two reasons. The bad reason is ambition and laziness: some people would rather push a button and build a fake castle, than work all day to build a real bookshelf. The good reason is that power has become so centralized that there is little room for autonomous production. Would you rather build a house in Minecraft, working from your own design at your own pace, or work on a stressful construction site building an ugly house for someone you don't know?

Also on the self-improvement subject, via the financial independence subreddit, a nice blog post on minimialism:

I like showing up for a group mountain hike where inevitably everyone's wearing specialized wicking techno-clothing, boots that cost more than my monthly rent, carrying giant back packs, and usually someone even has carbon-fiber walking poles. Meanwhile I'm there in my sneakers, cotton t-shirt, with my lunch stuffed into the leg pockets of my cargo pants and a big bottle of water in my hand. Guess who's usually the first to the summit?

The author claims not to be a minimalist because he does it for practical reasons rather than virtuous reasons. I would almost say the opposite: if you reduce your stuff for anything other than practical reasons, you're not a minimalist because you don't really understand it.

Also on the subject of more stuff being bad for you, an important argument that GPS navigators make us stupid. The idea is that without the devices, we have to build cognitive maps, which is great mental exercise. I appreciate all the people on this tour who have given me rides using GPS devices, but I would never use one myself. I always go on google maps (or openstreetmap.org) and sketch a map with pen and paper. When you're traveling, the most important thing is understanding where you are. With GPS navigators, I can feel the understanding of where I am being sucked out of my mind and locked away in a computer.


February 7. There are some great comments in the discussion about yesterday's subject of raising kids. Moarbrains writes, "I am a little disappointed that Ran thought this article was worthwhile. How does this parenting style fit into his schema of power-with as opposed to power-over?" That's a good question, because it leads to the important distinction between constraint and coercion. Notice that the article is completely about constraint, setting limits, and not at all about forcing kids to do things they don't want to do. A perfect society or family has no coercion at all, but every universe of more than one person needs constraint. If kids get in the habit of making unreasonable demands and being obeyed, they will turn into adults who use power-over. A power-with system needs members who respect the boundaries of others and can let go of desires and demands that cross those boundaries.


February 6. Last night my Plainfield hosts took me to a great sauna potluck, so I missed the Super Bowl. Most years I'll watch it because the game is usually fun and I like to analyze the commercials as a window on the American collective consciousness. This year Kunstler has it covered in a new post: All Screaming Id, No Brains, No Honor. In his analysis of the ads, Americans know the system is collapsing, they wrongly blame outsiders, and they foolishly imagine they will personally thrive. There's also a great bit about Madonna: "Message to American women: be sluts as long as you possibly can because there is nothing else for you in this culture." Kunstler makes a minor mistake on lard. American food is not "lard-laden", but full of hydrogenated vegetable oil, and lard would make us healthier both physically and mentally.

I've got a bunch of links stacked up, but for today, just one more, also bashing American culture: Why French Parents Are Superior. I don't endorse the whole article, but a few points should be noncontroversial: 1) It's better to give kids clear boundaries that are consistently enforced, than vague boundaries that are inconsistently enforced. 2) It's good for kids to learn to play by themselves. 3) It's not good if the kids are leading and the parents are always reacting. 4) It's good for kids to learn to delay gratification. I'm not sure how you would follow the last two without following the cruel advice to ignore kids while they "cry it out". This is a subject on which people have strong opinions, so I've made a subreddit link. Setting clear boundaries myself, I will read comments over email but not reply or post them.


February 4, late. Thanks John for driving me from Cape Cod up to Plainfield VT, where I'll be staying for at least three more days. This seems to be a great town. When I stay with people who are not happy with where they're living, I invite them to move to Spokane but admit that Portland is the American city with the best culture. Here's a great video from the show Portlandia: The Dream of the 90's.


February 4. Stray links. Daniel sends an article about fungi that can eat polyurethane in landfills. What about other kinds of plastic? Can we just inject it in landfills, or is it more complicated? And if it is that simple, will biotech come up with organisms that eat synthetic materials we're still using?

A more plausible doom scenario: how a solar storm could bring down power grids.

And Do The Math covers nuclear fusion. Basically it's potentially abundant, but the technology is so hard that even if we can do it, it might be too expensive to be worth the trouble. Meanwhile we already have a giant fusion plant in the sky: the sun. The author suggests that solving storage for solar might be easier than solving fusion, and that humans are pursuing fusion for psychological reasons. I would say that we want to make our own suns so we can feel like gods.




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