novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
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"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
search this site
March 14. By the way, I'm aware that people who are serious about "magic" like to hoard the word, and say that many things popularly called "magic" are not magic. This is a semantic argument, and unwinnable. As a word takes on more meanings, it's best to go with the flow, and instead of saying "you can't call that magic", say "here are some similarities and differences between some things that people call magic."
Anyway, a reader sends this 2007 Ribbonfarm post, Harry Potter and the Concept of Magic, and even though it slips into semantic hoarding, it has some great thoughts on old-fashioned woo-woo magic:
Magic is an imaginative conception of the lawfulness of a universe where matter has the attributes of consciousness, and can be engaged purely through intention. It is the product of our (primarily emotional and existential rather than intellectual) yearning to connect with the physical world beyond living organisms.
...
I think we get closest to our natural conception of magic if we understand it as a lawfulness that governs the connectedness/disconnectedness of a universal consciousness. When I am able to summon up that broomstick, I become one with the broomstick in some way.
March 14. Continuing on this week's subject, I've mentioned old-fashioned "magic" where you influence reality directly through consciousness, and "magic" based on physical technologies or skills that the audience doesn't understand. A reader mentions one more:
I would add the category of organizational or social control: getting people to do things without them feeling that you are forcing them, or even always realizing that you are leading them. So we're talking advertising, propaganda, management, compulsory education... a lot of these methods are ones that certain people can SEE happening around them, but that most people don't recognize even when they are the object of the control.
I suspect that just as with technologies, there are more and less "evil" or "good" methods here. My advice to any leader who wishes to be "good" is to employ any such "magic" only very sparingly! It's possible to trick people into doing the better thing for themselves and the All, but then you aren't teaching them anything, and they can't go forward without you, or in opposition to you if needed.
I think you can take apart any profession and you will see the actors fall somewhat clearly to one side of that line or the other. The buzz-word for the "good" guys is Empowerment. I can sell you X forever, or I can show you how to do/make/get X on your own.
March 13. A reader has started a subreddit thread on yesterday's subject, and makes a great comment: the reason you can't use the power of the mind to make a shortcut around the physical world and satisfy your desires, is that "desire and thought are physical processes, and can only have physical effects." Money, sex, food, toys, power over others -- if that's what you're after, you're already in the realm of the physical, and you have to act on that level.
Also Andy comments over email: "people talk about wanting 'magic' in their intimate partnerships, when success is more about hard work." That context never occurred to me, but it totally fits. If you want to be swept off your feet by a magical romance, then you're asking the other person to be the performer while you're the audience, and you're almost asking to be seduced by a sociopath. It's better to think of it as two people working together to design and build a beautiful house.
March 12. (permalink) A week ago, Doug in St Paul took me on an overnight trip to a successful homestead in northern Minnesota, and from their collection of books I reread a New Age classic, Richard Bach's Illusions. Now I understand better where the New Age movement went wrong. I agree that pure consciousness is the foundation of all reality, that you are a larger being who lives your life the way you would watch a movie, and that the physical world can be changed through the power of the mind. The mistake, the "fall", is the idea that changing the world through the power of the mind is easy, that anyone can perform miracles just by really, truly believing they're possible.
Suppose that you spend decades mastering woodworking, and you build a beautiful house with your own hands. Then some lazy idiot comes along and builds a better house in seconds just by believing it into existence. There's no evidence that reality works this way, and I think it can't work this way, because it would violate some kind of metaphysical law of conservation of energy: Doing any task with pure mind power must be at least as difficult as doing it with physical tools. Or, the easiest way to build a house with your mind is to mentally discipline yourself to build it with your hands. The deeper principle here is that the physical world is itself a tool for channeling consciousness, and not an obstacle to childish wish fulfillment.
If you accept that changing the world is damn hard no matter how you do it, Illusions has another idea, mentioned in passing, that's brilliant: If an action seems like magic, it's because you don't understand it; to perform the action, you have to understand it well enough that it seems like a mundane craft or skill. You can see this in stage magic, where the audience might see someone levitating but the performer knows the trick. I think it also applies to "paranormal" levitation, where the trick lies outside 20th century science, but still seems normal to the performer. In any case, if something seems like magic to you, then you are the audience, not the actor, and if you think you're the actor, that's part of the trick.
You can see this in almost every modern technology: searching the internet, playing a video game, buying groceries, riding a jet ski. You feel like you have the power, but the less you understand how the system works, and the less you are able to build it yourself, the more you are merely a member of the audience, passively consuming entertainment.
March 11. Today I stuck a new update on the top of How to Drop Out, with some factoids about counter-culture heroes who had uncommon support from family and friends, and a link to my new frugal retirement page.
March 11. A few loose ends on yesterday's war link. I don't agree with the author that most soldiers are "sociopaths". That's become a vague buzzword for "bad person", when really it's a particular kind of bad person who not only lacks empathy but is typically charming, impulsive, and irresponsible. Ted, who has been in the infantry, writes:
I think I would describe soldiers as having authoritarian personality more than anti-social personality. The authoritarian personality is aggressive when violence is sanctioned by authorities. These aren't simply thrill seekers that love violence. People like that are too hard to control.
Also, Sean sends a follow-up article on the same blog, Call of Apathy: Advanced Warfighter, arguing that the future of the military is not remorseless thugs, but remote button-pushers. But another reader sends this article, High Levels Of Burnout In U.S. Drone Pilots.
Of course, after unmanned killing machines, the next step is autonomous killing machines, where no human is even aware of the violence. In both cases, there's an interesting question. If you make an unprovoked attack on a machine, is it legal for the machine to respond with lethal force? The sane answer is no. The most the machine can do is take a picture of you and later you can be charged with vandalism. But this would make drones too tactically weak. The law will be changed, and you will still not be allowed to booby-trap your car, but machines in the service of the domination system will have the rights of self-defense formerly reserved to humans.
March 10. Unrelated stray links. Homeless by Choice: How to Live for Free in America is a sample of a new book, The Man Who Quit Money, about Daniel Suelo, the guy who lives in the Utah desert. I'm sure he gets more help from friends, and less food from wild foraging, than the article implies. There is room for thousands more people to live this way, but not millions, unless we build a whole different food system.
We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction. I've written that humans are a bombproof species, but this interview makes an important point: the danger is not from threats we've faced before, like plagues and asteroid strikes, but threats that do not exist yet, because we're going to create them ourselves.
Call of Apathy: Violent Young Men and Our Place in War, written by an anonymous mercenary and former (British?) soldier:
People need to realise that their wars are not fought by the guy on the news that lost a leg and loves his flag -- he was the FNG [fucking new guy] that got blown up because he was incompetent, who left the fight before it turned him into one of us. The world needs to be made aware of my kind: the silent majority of fighters, those that do not care about politics, religion, ethics, or anything else other than war for war's sake.
...
My psychologist estimated that roughly 80% of infantrymen have an undiagnosed violent personality disorder. These aren't hard stats, but it's interesting when compared to the 20% that suffer from PTSD.
Finally, TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog. Worthless? How can anyone still think the purpose of airport screening is to keep weapons off airplanes? It's an abuse ritual. And the worse it is at keeping weapons off airplanes, the better it is at training us to submit to an insane authority. Every revelation that the scanners don't protect us, makes them more effective for their real purpose.
March 9. Here it is, my Winter Tour FAQ, mostly about the tour I just finished but some of the stuff is from my trip three years ago. I'll probably add a few more things as I think of them.
March 9. Just letting everyone know I'm back in Spokane. I'll eventually post something about my tour, but for now I need to catch up on stuff and figure out how I'll be getting online. If I can't pick up a wifi network from my house, I'll be continuing to come to the library, which might be a good thing. Update: from the house I can get one open network that fades in and out.
March 7. A reader has just uploaded four videos, around 100 minutes total, of me being interviewed for What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. Here are part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and a post on the subreddit.
I may eventually add some annotations. A few notes: 1) I say that a runaway greenhouse effect could make Earth like Venus, but later I found out that's impossible because too much carbon has been locked up in limestone -- unless they figure out how to burn limestone! 2) The book The Parable of the Tribes was written by Andrew Bard Schmookler, and I fear his idea will be mistakenly credited to me.
March 4. Just bought a train ticket leaving Wednesday night, arriving in Spokane very early Friday morning.
March 3. Paula has a new post about Personal Energy Distribution, and I really like her idea of applying EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) to personal energy. You can invest energy now, on things like eating better and not smoking, and in the long term you'll get back more energy than you spent. But if you're already living on the edge of survival, you don't have any extra energy to invest. It occurs to me that declining empires are just like poor people! They are in an energy trap, where they need to spend extra energy to invest in a better way of living, but they can't because they have to use all the energy they have just to avoid a catastrophe. These are both examples of being behind the power curve.
March 2. Seven experiments show that rich people are more likely to lie and cheat. The researcher speculates that poor people have to rely more on others, so they "are more likely to adhere to community standards." I would say the poor are more accountable to community standards. Money is power, and the more power you have, the more lying and cheating you can get away with.
This is just a specific case of a general law of human society: Control is self-increasing. There are exceptions: enlightened individuals with authority are able to keep their level of authority stable at what they have earned, and small communities are able to rein in people who abuse power. But large systems, run by ordinary people, inevitably use central control to strengthen central control. You can't stop it. The only way to bring society back into balance is to let the process run its course, until the control system is so dysfunctional and disrespected that it collapses. Then the game starts again. I think it's possible to build a large complex society with negative feedback in power-over, but it has not been done yet, and it may require a change in human nature.
I've arrived in the Minneapolis St Paul area. I'll be in Cottage Grove until Sunday, then I plan to stay in St Paul a few more days before I head home. I now have two ride offers, but I'm leaning toward taking Amtrak. At $159, the train costs about the same as total one-way gas, and twice my share of the gas. But if I consider gas costs for me and a driver combined, including the return trip, then the train is half the cost of gas, and that's not even counting motels. And if we avoid motels by sleeping in the car, that's less pleasant than sleeping on the train.
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.