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
May 8. I've just deleted some of this morning's post. Those bastards almost got me. I was thinking there's a conflict between the dropout purists and the dropout opportunists -- but then it occurred to me, I've never actually met a dropout purist. I don't think they exist. We are all opportunists. Can you imagine a prison inmate who thinks some ways to escape are acceptable, and other ways are cheating? A voice might tell you that, and it might claim to be a fellow prisoner, but it is always, always a guard.
May 8. Going back to Sunday's subject of different interpretations of "dropping out", Gabriel sends this transcript:
Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?
Cormac McCarthy: I'm really not. I mean, it's not that I don't like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn't want to work.
Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.
McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.
Oprah: That you didn't want to have a nine-to-five job?
McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, 'You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.' And I don't have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you're really dedicated you can probably do it.
Oprah: So you worked at not working.
McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.
Now, it's not my position that anyone can live without having a job if they really try. But I think almost everyone has room to move in that direction. And some of the obstacles are not economic but psychological. Why do we idolize Dick Proenneke who built a cabin in Alaska, and despise some guy living in his parents' basement, even though they're equally dependent on friends and family? Why are the cool ways of dropping out so difficult, and the easy ways so uncool? I'm totally in favor of living with your parents, going on the dole, investing in Monsanto, marrying into money, selling ads on your blog, whatever your easiest path is to the foundation and precondition of true meaning in life: giant blocks of time when there's nothing you're supposed to be doing. This is what I was getting at in How To Drop Out, when I said it's better to get a slack job you don't care about, than try to get a job doing something you love. Because you don't even know what you love until you break your life down and build it up from giant blocks of unstructured time. One word of caution: whatever you're doing to make money so you can do nothing, don't get sucked into the game; keep your eye on the prize.
May 7. A few people have asked how my chest fridge is working out. Last summer I bought a 9 cubic foot chest freezer intending to use it as a refrigerator, but it was too small, so I put it in the basement as an actual freezer and got a larger one for the kitchen, a 14.8 cubic foot GE with four baskets. If you do this, I recommend maximizing baskets, and you also need a kitchen with a good spot to put it. One of the reasons I picked out this house was it had a perfect spot for a chest fridge. Anyway, to convert the freezer to a fridge, I use this freezer temperature controller. It's a master thermostat that goes between the freezer and the wall socket, making the freezer thermostat irrelevant. One disadvantage is that when the cooling is off, the whole freezer is off, so the light doesn't work. But it saves a huge amount of electricity! I've tested it with a kill-o-watt meter, and it runs about 0.25 kWh/day, or an average of about ten watts! That's in early spring, when the inside of my house is 55-60F. (I'm also frugal with heating.) I'll test it again in July.
May 6. There's a new subreddit post that accidentally expands on the archived post I linked to Friday, in which I wrote:
If an emotional display comes raw from inside you, you will most likely be punished for it; if there is an emotional display that you are rewarded for showing, most people who show it will be faking it.
This applies not only to emotions but identity. Our culture gives us a set of cliches, or myths, or stereotypes. The more you show yourself as you really are, the more you will come into conflict with people who want you to fit a box that's already in their head, so they don't have to think to understand you. And the more perfectly someone seems to fit one of those boxes, the more likely they're faking it. (There's a grey area between pretending to be what you're not, and changing yourself, which I'm not going to get into now.)May 5. Some light stuff for the weekend. A video of the most ridiculous invention ever, the Speedfit Speedmobile. And the best cat from the Cats That Look Like Hitler site, Snowball.
May 4. By the way, the epic reddit confession thread is still going on! And the person who started it is planning a book. One thing that surprised me is how many people go through life pretending to be cheerful and confident when they are secretly afraid and unhappy. It reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where there's a field of sheep, and they start taking off their costumes, and it turns out they're all actually wolves. Also here's a post I made last fall about real and fake emotions.
May 4. (condensed permalink) Continuing on the slow collapse subject, Nick sends a link about The Jet That Ate the Pentagon. The F-35 is designed to do everything, and the result is that it's obscenely expensive and does everything badly. This reminds me of the custom unit design system in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: if you try to make a super-unit that does everything, it's too expensive, and it's much more cost-effective to design many simple units that are each good at one thing. So now I'm thinking, how is it that game designers know this, and designers of real military units don't? I guess that's like asking, how is it that fiction writers know that being rich doesn't make you happy, while in real life people still try to get rich?
Anyway, the article concludes that "the problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper." Does this remind you of anything else? This is one more example of what seems to be a universal cycle: systems get more and more complex, until the costs of complexity so overwhelm the benefits that the system can be made both cheaper and more effective by a radical simplification. The challenge, in human society, is to achieve this simplification without causing so much trauma that life is nasty for generations.
Related new Archdruid post: Democracy's Arc. Greer describes a cycle, observed as far back as ancient Greece, where a dictatorship turns into rule by a small group, and then a larger and larger group, and finally a democracy, which gets bogged down by complexity and factionalism, until people are ready for a dictator to come in and wipe the slate clean:
Glance back over American history and it's hard to miss the pattern, repeating over a period that runs roughly seventy to eighty years. The dictator-figures were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, each of whom overturned existing structures in order to consolidate their power, and did so with scant regard for existing law. The juntas were the old Whigs, the Republicans, and the New Deal Democrats, each of them representatives of a single social class; they were overthrown in turn by Jacksonian populism, the Progressive movement, and the complex social convulsions of the Sixties, each of which diffused power across a broader section of the citizenry. The first cycle ended in stalemate over the issue of slavery; the second ended in a comparable stalemate over finding an effective response to the Great Depression; the third -- well, that's where we are right now.
May 2. One of my favorite subjects is the aging and eventual decrease of the human population. Here's a 2009 post with a nice animated gif, U.S. Population Distribution by Age, 1950 through 2050. The author points out that the original baby bust, before the baby boom, is now at the age of peak medical expenses, so "these are the best of times for health care." Oh shit.
And a longer, very smart article about the country at the leading edge of this trend: Japan Shrinks. It covers many angles, including dementia, economic contraction, and robots. One bit that surprises me is that Singapore has tried to bribe people to have more kids, and failed. I was thinking the decision to have kids was mostly economic: so third worlders have huge families to work on the farm and take care of them when they get old, while urban first worlders avoid kids as a financial burden. But now it looks like culture trumps economics, and people will go against their rational interests (either having more kids or fewer) if it makes life feel meaningful.
(permalink for the following two paragraphs) Another slow doom link, The devaluation of everything: The perils of panflation. It's not about prices getting higher, but about language and culture getting distorted by the desire for things to appear better and better. So women's clothing sizes are four inches bigger than they used to be, academic work that used to get a C now gets an A, the cheapest room in a hotel is called "deluxe", the smallest pizzas and coffees are called "regular", airline "miles" have no relation to actual miles, and so on.
This comes down to the same thing as an article I posted a month ago about signal spoofing, and I think this is a bigger threat to civilization than peak oil or climate change. Those will cause pain and force adaptation, while the overall system muddles through. But a ratcheting distortion of language cannot be reset by anything less than total cultural collapse. It's easier to burn down every school in the world, than for one school to change its name from "university" back to "college". And the farther our language veers off from reality, the more we will despise our own society and wish for it to collapse.
Related: Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos.
May 1. This is probably the most powerful reddit thread I've ever seen, What's your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out? (Update: 5pm and they're still coming in. Try sorting by new.)
April 30. Stray links. The Invention of Jaywalking is a depressing article about how cars colonized and destroyed the human mind so they could then destroy the city. People not in cars used to have the right of way in the middle of every street, all the time. Teaching kids to stop and wait for traffic was one of those things that seems to be good but is really evil, because it shifts responsibility from cars to people. If kids had been taught to run out in the street without looking, it would have preserved a different view of traffic, with slower more careful drivers and fewer deaths. In Cincinnati there was an attempt to require all cars to have a maximum speed of 25mph. If this had taken off, it would have saved tens of millions of lives, delayed peak oil by decades, made a better urban landscape, and probably saved us time, since we build everything far apart in the expectation of going fast and end up getting stuck in traffic and going slow. But I'm wondering if we're better off in the long term. If cars had been limited to 25mph, it would now be easy to switch to solar golf carts and preserve universal motoring. What will happen instead is that people who can afford it will continue to drive 75mph on toll roads, while the rest of us rearrange our lives for walking and bicycling. Related image (thanks Trevor).
A smart article on peak plastic. You might expect an argument that we're going back to a preindustrial lifestyle, but instead he argues that one day plastic will have nostalgia value, and the cheapest way to get it will be harvesting landfills.
This BBC article, Why do we need to sleep?, suggests something that I've been saying for years: instead of asking why we sleep, we should consider sleep the default state, and ask "why are we awake?" Now, just because the answer is obvious -- we need to eat and make shelter and reproduce -- does not mean this is the wrong way to think about sleep. If we could somehow eat and protect ourselves and reproduce without being awake, then we could spend our entire lives in the wonderful world of sleep. How about it, science? Where's a transhumanist when you need one?
A reader sent me a free ebook of a novel he wrote, The Heirloom. I don't plan to read it, but some of you might want to check it out. This reminds me, I don't think I ever mentioned that Tim Bennett, who made "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire", has now written a novel, All of the Above.
Finally, I've seen a lot of links to this image of corporate brands, hundreds of common products that are owned by just a few big companies. There's no commentary, so you can draw your own message. What I notice is that I can find only one product on the whole page that I've bought in the last five years, some Philadelphia cream cheese to make cake frosting for people who wouldn't care that it wasn't organic. And it's not that I'm trying to avoid guilt, but that almost all of these products are either crap or overpriced. They're either unnecessary in the first place, or there's something much better for a little more money, or there's a cheap store brand that's just as good. The message I draw is, people have brand loyalty because they're not thinking clearly, and corporations are taking advantage of this mistake, like predators in an ecosystem.
April 27. quick post on the landblog/houseblog, about adding blueberries to my yard, plus a photo of the back yard in spring.
April 27. Okay, I'm going to try to polish off this subject, and I've tacked today's post onto the end of yesterday's permalink. Joel mentions an important way health care is different from the other stuff I mentioned: it requires one-to-one skilled labor. When you see a doctor, one hour of your time equals one hour of the doctor's time. With food, clothing, and transportation, one hour of an engineer's time can be multiplied hundreds of times by machinery. And when it isn't, when you buy a car or a coat made skillfully by hand, or food at a farmer's market, you pay a lot more for that human attention. Think of it from the doctor's perspective: would you rather sell an hour of your time to someone who can pay $1000, or someone who can only pay $50? Doctors often make up for this by treating the very poor for free, but that leaves the middle class hanging, and it doesn't solve the deeper problem: the American medical system has been designed for the rich. It is economically impossible to make it available to everyone, and yet, it is politically impossible to not make it available to everyone.
A few days back I came up with a metaphor where a big ship is slowly sinking, and we're getting on lifeboats, but if you get sick, only the ship has a hospital. That's not quite right. The hospital was on the ship, but now it's being moved to the the special LifeYacht, and there are only two ways to get on it, as an owner or as a servant. The more I think about this, the more I see that we're going to have to build a "lifeboat" medical system, with a big DIY element. We can mostly replace the skilled attention of doctors with our own skilled attention, especially in lifestyle choices and diagnosis, and there must be room for home versions of technologies that now exist only in hospitals. Computers can drive cars -- how long will it be before they can do surgery?
April 26. Christina comments:
I gave up health/vision/dental insurance nearly six years ago. Instead, I put that money toward saving, buying what I need without going into debt, etc. And you know what? I don't even miss it. Honestly, if the worst happened, and I could only be helped by being hospitalized, then I would have no plans to pay the bill. Invariably I get the response of "but that's what makes it more expensive for everyone else." But at some point, somebody has to stop caring about this so much.
Now I'm thinking, (permalink...) why exactly is modern health care so expensive? The answer we take for granted is that it's better, because of technology. Okay, but it is 100 times better than preindustrial health care? Then why does it cost 100 times as much? And why are other things that have improved with technology not more expensive? Wikipedia is faster, bigger, and cheaper than a paper encyclopedia. A gore tex jacket is better rain protection than an animal skin, and you can get one with fewer hours of labor. We travel more efficiently on airplanes than our ancestors did on foot. If transportation were like health care, we'd say, "It used to take a whole day to travel 20 miles. Now, with miraculous technologies, it only takes half a day, and that's why it costs ten thousand dollars."
The difference is, people feel differently about adding an hour to the end of their lives, than saving an hour of walking. (Related: How Doctors Die.) Modern health care is expensive, not for technological reasons, but for cultural reasons. There's a lot of room to use high tech (or low tech) to make it cheaper, if we can stop mystifying it, and take the same risks and responsibilities that we take in other parts of our lives. Anne, who is in medical school, comments:
I think the secret behind the health care debate is that it doesn't work for anyone. It's not some conspiracy to get people into college, or debt, or shitty jobs, it's just a complete floor-to-ceiling trainwreck. The core belief is that money conquers mortality. It doesn't, but that won't stop people from spending everything they have to try. Even the people who talk about how they don't want health insurance only like to discuss the financial aspects -- "well, then I'd have to declare bankruptcy" -- more than the health consequences. The truth is, if you have a heart attack, there's a good chance you'll lie on your back for a few weeks and then die, no matter how much money anyone spends. If you break a hip, same thing. Pneumonia, same thing. You can push the margins a bit, with a firehose-full of cash, and that's why the system doesn't work.
April 25. (condensed permalink) Back to the popular subject of American health care, a friend I stayed with on my tour writes:
Health insurance is the biggest point of conflict between me and my mother. This most recent time, I left her house so frustrated and hopeless that I actually considered going on food stamps so I could divert $300 or $400 per month to buy health insurance. We eat well, we're active. I found a physician who takes actual cash, and I saw her last summer when my body went into crisis mode. I understand that if I break a bone, I'll be screwed, but the only other solution that would satisfy my mother would be to go back to school, go $100,000 deeper into debt to get qualified for a job I won't be passionate about so maybe they'll give me health insurance. I think that's crazy, she thinks that's the American Dream.
In this context, I can see that the health care issue is tied up with more difficult issues of class and the meaning of life. I bet most people reading this do not have a single ancestor who had a job they were passionate about. Our remote ancestors had nothing we would call a "job", and our recent ancestors saw wage labor as a chore they had to do in exchange for the benefits of modernity. Only a few lucky people get to have jobs they love -- and that's okay. We haven't worked out yet how to build a complex society out of intrinsically meaningful activity, and it's better for some people to love their jobs than nobody.
But the present situation is much, much worse. The American managerial class is so powerful, so immature, and so secretly unhappy, that it's not enough for them to love their jobs personally -- they expect everyone under them to also love their jobs. You can't even get a job at McDonalds if you admit that you're just doing it because you need the money. I'm tempted to say this is worse than slavery, except it must happen with slavery too. If the managers can not only fire you, but can also have you beaten and killed, then they can really force you to pretend to enjoy your work so they can feel good about themselves.
It also happens with parents. The baby boomers, and to some extent the two generations before them, got to live the American dream -- but some of them are not satisfied, and want their kids to live it too. George Carlin said "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." Even at its best, it only gave people enough ribbons and toys to not notice they had no participation in power. Now even the ribbons and toys are becoming vaporous. A college degree is like a $100,000 lottery ticket, guaranteed to put you in debt and unlikely to get you a job. Young people can't afford cars or houses but they can still afford to play Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft. Even jobs that "give you" health insurance typically sell you very expensive health insurance by deducting the premiums from your salary.
So what's the answer? Economic collapse is already underway, and we have to surf it down. The first step is to let go of some of the things you're supposed to care about. Here's a related reddit thread, For anyone who stopped giving a fuck, what were the results?
As for health care, I have yet to see any solution that's politically realistic. My personal strategy is to live like I'm already in the Zombie Apocalypse: if I get seriously sick or injured, I die. Really I would just lose all my savings and be in the same boat as everyone else -- that is, out of my lifeboat and back on the Titanic. To expand the metaphor, we're all on a big ship that's sinking, we're getting on lifeboats, but only the ship has a hospital! So if you get sick you have to go back on the ship and maybe sink with it. The solution, then, is to build lifeboat clinics: sources of good health care, including emergency care, on the fringes of the money economy.
April 25. On yesterday's biphasic sleep topic, Daniel sends this great Robb Wolf post about sleep and artificial lighting. Our ancestors who practiced biphasic sleep could sleep four hours, be up for four hours, and sleep another four hours, all in darkness. Our eight hour sleep pattern is "an attempt to deal with a chronic stressor": artifical light is the worst of both worlds, not bright enough to make us happy and give us vitamin D, but not dark enough for good sleep.
April 24. Today, some personal health stuff. There's increasing evidence that sitting is really bad for you. According to a new study,
people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying in the next three years than people who sat less than four hours a day. This was after adjusting for factors such as age, weight, physical activity and general health status, all of which affect the death risk. It also found a clear dose-response effect: the more people sat, the higher their risk of death.
So I've converted my sitting computer desk to a stand-up desk, by stacking a table on top of it. Wait, here's a photo. This effectively limits my computer time because my feet get tired!
Also I've been stretching and exercising more, especially the doorway stretch (illustrated on this page). More than one massage therapist has told me that if everyone did this stretch, they'd be out of a job.
And I'm experimenting with biphasic sleep. Supposedly, before the industrial age, it was normal for humans to get up in the middle of the night and do stuff, instead of lying awake. It probably takes practice, because the last time I tried it, my second phase of sleep was so low quality that it took me two days to catch up. Maybe I could just get up at 4am and then take a giant nap in the middle of the day.
April 23. Today, some book reviews. By an unlikely coincidence, the last seven novels I've read have all been first person. First the Hunger Games trilogy, which are all great fun. I like them better than Harry Potter because the plot changes from one book to the next.
Then, on Andy's recommendation, I read the two volume Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson, who also wrote one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Feed. Octavian is a slave, living during the time of the American war of secession from England, who is raised with the finest classical education by creepy rationalists who are doing an experiment to test racial equality. The books are extremely well written and well researched, emotionally powerful, and show a valuable perspective on early America. You should read them because they're good for you, but you won't like it, and I couldn't finish the second. The first book is like being repeatedly punched in the gut, and the second book is like getting a tooth pulled for fifty hours. My point is, at least the first book isn't boring.
Then, on Anne's recommendation, I read Far North by Marcel Theroux. There's a stretch after page 100 where I almost lost interest, but I'm glad I stuck it out because it's a very good post-apocalypse story. It's set in Siberia, among ruined cities founded by American back-to-the-landers, which were then overrun by refugees from climate change. The narrator is the last resident of one of these cities, a skilled survivalist who goes on the road seeking civilization, and endures a lot of bad stuff in a way that makes the book sort of uplifting.
Finally, on Todd's recommendation, I just finished Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It's similar to Daemon in that a genius game designer dies and sets in motion an epic conflict. But in this case, the plot is a transparent excuse for an over-the-top Gen-X geek nostalgia fest. I agree with Cline's view of the future, in which virtual reality continues to improve while the physical world has an extreme gap between rich and poor. But the book's bleakest and most radical vision only appears when you read against the text: in the future, humanity will be so degraded that young people will have no culture of their own, but will obsessively replay the culture of the late 20th century.
April 22. I think yesterday's post is the most boring I've ever made. New subject tomorrow. Happy Earth Day!
April 21. I've pulled the line from yesterday's post about transferring wealth from the young to the old. I still think it's mostly true, but it's distracting people from the more precise fact that healthy people with less money are being asked to subsidize unhealthy people with more money. More generally, I think it's more useful to frame the issue in terms of ordinary people having to make sacrifices, than in terms of some great evil that can simply be destroyed. If the story is that the 1% are exploiting the 99%, then the most stable solution is for the government to aggressively tax the rich, and the best solution is to fundamentally change the economy so that wealth no longer has positive feedback. Unfortunately, both of those are less realistic than a violent revolution in which the poor rise up and kill the rich. And historically that has almost always made things worse.
And if the insurance companies are evil, then the solution is to replace them with a single-payer public system, but that's impossible at the federal level, and if it could somehow be done state by state, it would still eliminate millions of jobs in the medical billing industry. I think it's better to pay those people to sit home and do nothing than to do wasteful jobs, but that requires a deep change in culture, in which people who still have jobs do not resent people who are lounging in the safety net.
The most realistic solution I can see is, first kill the mandate, and then try to get some kind of reform without it, which will be difficult. Second, more and more people have to refuse to buy insurance until it becomes a good deal. That means if you need medical care you have to get it cheap outside the system, or pay tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, or go deep into unpayable debt. The next step is to reform bankruptcy to make it ridiculously easy to erase your debts and start over. We've got a good shot at this, but it will require even more sacrifice by ordinary people, because most investments, even your savings account, depend on the reliable repayment of debt.
April 20. (permalink) The other day I figured out the health insurance mandate. The excuse is, without the mandate, people who are healthier than average have no incentive to buy insurance, because it's likely to be cheaper for us to pay out of pocket. So, unless healthy people are forced by law to buy insurance, unhealthy people will have to pay more than they can afford. Now, America could fix this like every other rich nation, and pay for health care the way we pay for roads and wars: direct government funding, with the money raised through progressive taxation, in which people with more money pay more. To avoid this, we get the mandate. That is, instead of the unhealthy being subsidized by the rich, the unhealthy are subsidized by the healthy. So the insurance mandate is a massive wealth transfer from the poor and healthy to the rich and unhealthy.
Related, a Dmitry Orlov post from a few weeks ago: A Modest Health Care Proposal.
April 18. Stuart Staniford at Early Warning usually makes highly technical posts like "Spatial Coherence of Illinois Corn Yields". But sometimes he dumbs it down enough that I can understand. Yesterday he did that twice. First, The Median Influencer quotes a post by Randy Waldman, using terms like "polity" and "incumbent creditors" to explain a big economic mistake. To grossly simplify: the future of the economy is being sacrificed so that Baby Boomers can keep their pensions.
Next, Global Robot Population makes some depressing forecasts about the future of automation. Basically, there will be more and more unemployed people, and ideally they would be allowed to be idle and still have their basic needs provided. But that violates American culture, so the unemployed will be put in prisons, and prevented from escaping or revolting through high-tech surveillance and robots.
My comment here is that Americans hate their jobs. If you like your job (or if you're unselfish) then you have no reason to care if someone is being supported for doing nothing while you work. Many primitive cultures have no word for "freeloading", and there are people who do no "work" and nobody cares. This must be because all their useful activity is intrinsically rewarding. "Freeloading" only arises when useful activity is separated from intrinsic reward. Then society must use things like money and shame to drive people from useless rewarding activity (play) toward useful unrewarding activity (work). The task before us is to reunite useful activity with intrinsic reward, in the context of a high-tech society. I don't think we're going to get it right on the first try.
April 17. Just found this great comment thread: Military personnel of Reddit, what misconceptions do civilians have about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
April 16. Stray links. Some thoughts on the passing of William Corliss, who compiled many books of scientific anomalies. Where Charles Fort was a daring stylist and philosopher, Corliss was more cautious and respectable.
On Mythodrome, Disentangling the Deities argues that Elohim, the creator in Genesis, is not a sky father but more like the Tao, and that the modern Christian concept of "God" was derived from Roman paganism.
The Most Dangerous Gamer is a profile of Jonathan Blow, who is doing more than anyone else to make games into high art, with Braid and a new one called The Witness.
And in case anyone missed it, There Is No Invisible Hand. Even Adam Smith only mentioned it one time, and focused more on situations where unregulated markets are harmful.
April 14. Long post on Do The Math, Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist. The economist has to admit that energy consumption and GDP cannot keep growing indefinitely, or even for much longer at present rates. But the physicist admits that it is possible for things to keep getting qualitatively better in a steady state economy.
And a loooong post on The Hipcrime Vocab, The Depopulation Bomb. Birthrates are falling almost everywhere, there will be fewer children and more old people, and this will not be a catastrophe, but a challenge, with the potential for a better world, if we can adapt to lower consumption. I'm interested in the psychological effects of a very high average age. Old people can be wiser, but they can also be more set in their ways.
April 13. Continuing on the subject of the survival of mechanization, Gabriel sends this article, The Dignity of Sloth, speculating about a future where most human labor has been replaced by machines and computers, and people with below average intelligence are kept busy with games. So even if the games cannot be turned to any useful purpose, they still serve to keep people out of trouble. Something like this is already happening: studies show that internet porn reduces rape and violent movies reduce violence. I wonder if games also protect us from people with high intelligence. Maybe if it weren't for strategy games, I would have to fill my need for detail-focused management by being someone's evil boss.
More generally, computer games are the best technology yet for bridging the gap between how we feel like living, and how we must live to keep society going. Even primitive societies have to deal with this problem. They don't just tell each other to do what they feel like, but have rules and customs, including customs that allow young men the excitement of warfare while minimizing injury and death. This is exactly what we've done with games like Call of Duty, where the only injuries are repetitive strain and vitamin D deficiency.
How we feel like living is grounded in our biological nature, most of which is not human but pre-human. I think this is why the fantasy genre is so popular, because it reflects the world of our deep ancestors: their consciousness was magical not rational, hunters went on violent quests and foragers searched for hidden treasures, and we lived among other species that matched us in intelligence. We don't just want to live this way in games -- if we can, we will live this way again in the physical world. Here's a related piece I wrote ten years ago: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.
April 12. Joel sends a response to the Paul Krugman piece from two days ago, The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis. While acknowledging that slavery is related to population density, the author adds another factor, monoculture vs polyculture:
Staple production is easier for gang-bosses to monitor than more diversified farming. Staple production also has lower skill requirements for workers. When demand for staple products is very high -- to feed the proletariat of imperial Rome, to feed the growing cities of late-Medieval Flanders, or to supply the cheap luxuries demanded by early modern England -- slavery or serfdom can emerge even without an extraordinarily high land/labor ratio.
Joel adds that this could answer Krugman's puzzle of why serfdom did not reemerge after the catastrophes of the 1300's crashed the population of Europe. As Carol Deppe mentions in The Resilient Gardener, farmers adapted to the instability of the time by adding many different crops and animals, and this could have made the agriculture system too complex to be managed by slave bosses.
Of course, today plantation slaves have been replaced by industrial machinery. Going back to this link from a few days ago, I used to think this whole system was doomed, but now I think it has an enduring niche. For turning sunlight to physical work, solar panels plus electric motors are more efficient than photosynthesis plus mammalian digestion. Unless there's a universal tech crash, which I doubt, large-scale mechanized agriculture will remain economically sustainable, and reforms to preserve topsoil could make it ecologically sustainable. So the reason to grow food in your backyard is not to save the world, but because it improves your own life.
April 10. A few links on economics. Hipcrime Vocab has a new post on Money and the Power of Symbols, summarizing David Hawkes:
The idea of something called "An Economy" as distinct from the larger society was invented by political philosophers in the eighteenth century as a way of rationalizing certain self-interested, avaricious and greedy behaviors that take place in a market economy which were formerly sanctioned by ethical and moral systems. A totally arbitrary distinction is made between behaviors that are "economic" and hence outside all other spheres of human relationships - political, social, ethical, religious etc. where naked self-interest is expected and justifiable.
From 2003, Paul Krugman on serfdom and population. The idea is, when population density is high, it's cheaper to hire a worker than to feed a slave. When population density is low, the ruling powers have to hold their workers through violence to stop them from running off and being self-sufficient. This is something we'll have to struggle with as global population declines.
The Beer Game, or Why Apple Can't Build iPads in the US. The idea is, if a manufacturing and distribution system is too far-flung, then each part of the system tries to make up for delays by anticipating future orders. This leads to a feedback loop, instability, and failure. So China is good at manufacturing because the supply chains are so dense. I'm wondering how this will change as home-scale fabricators get cheaper and better. Maybe in 20 years a town will decide to specialize in building ultracapacitors or brain implants or airships, with all components made locally by different people in their garages.
April 7. A reader asks me to elaborate on my statement that the merging of human consciousness with a global information network will not be stopped by energy decline. The short answer is, I have not yet seen a good argument that it will be stopped. We imagine that energy decline and economic collapse will eradicate all high tech, and reduce the whole planet to a preindustrial lifestyle, because it's easy to imagine. It's harder to imagine a collapse that's unevenly distributed. Historically, economic collapses do not reduce everyone to poverty, but increase the gap between rich and poor. I think the same thing is going to happen with technology: while overall resource consumption decreases, the proportion spent at the leading edge of technology will increase. Less energy will be spent moving physical stuff, and more will be spent moving information. Not only will there be a wider gap between the places with the highest and lowest technology, there will also be a wider gap between the highest and lowest technology used by an average person. Already there are African villagers with cell phones. In 20 years you may be living with a group of friends in an abandoned suburb, burning scrap wood for heat, growing open-source genetically modified sweet potatoes, and selling brain time to the dataswarm to gain credits for surgery to install a neuro-optical interface so you can swap out custom eyeballs.
On a similar subject, on the subreddit there's a link to this post from Hipcrime Vocab, What If The Peak Oil Movement Isn't About Peak Oil? Following Stuart Staniford, the author argues that higher energy prices will lead to more mechanization, because the cost of human workers will increase at least as much as the cost of energy for the machines -- especially machines that process information. So the reason to grow your own food is not to adapt to energy decline, but for other good reasons, which are still valid even if there's abundant energy.
April 6. Today, some links about technology and human cognition. First, a smart NYT article about Stupid Games, which the author distinguishes from "Hollywood" games like Halo. He writes, "You could argue that these are pure games: perfectly designed minisystems engineered to take us directly to the core of gaming pleasure without the distraction of narrative." I don't like Angry Birds, and I've never tried Tetris, but I remember being addicted to Mattel electronic football in the late 1970's. I'm also quite good at Minesweeper, Freecell, and Bejeweled 2, a rare game in which the purpose is to keep playing and a skilled player can keep playing indefinitely. Anyway, I can relate to this quote at the end of the article from Frank Lantz: "It was like a tightrope walk between this transcendently beautiful and cerebral thing that gave you all kinds of opportunities to improve yourself -- through study and self-discipline, making your mind stronger like a muscle -- and at the same time it was pure self-destruction."
Nancy sends this article about How electrical brain stimulation can change the way we think. Specifically it's about our distracting internal narrative (meditators call it the chattering monkey) and how the right kind of brain-zapping can suppress it and temporarily allow inner peace and faster learning of how to shoot an assault rifle.
And there's a lot of buzz about Google Goggles, another step in the merging of human consciousness with a computer-moderated global information network. I think this process will not be stopped by energy decline, it will create more problems than it solves, and it will change what it means to be human. For a pessimistic view, read the novel Feed by M.T. Anderson, in which we all have the internet in our heads all the time and it makes us weak and stupid. For an optimistic view, read the novel Freedom by Daniel Suarez, in which a game-like overlay, run by a benevolent AI, enables knowledge and power to be shared by everyone.
I've just subscribed to the Transhuman subreddit. These people are way too optimistic, but they're the only ones giving this stuff enough attention.
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. Also, I've started a Frugal Early Retirement FAQ.