Ran Prieur

November 28.

2012-11-28T12:48:11Z

November 28. Something big that I've been putting off for a week, and loosely related to yesterday's subject, the latest View from Hell post: Fungibility and the Loss of Demandingness. It's already too clear and concentrated to be summarized, but here are three sample paragraphs:

To sum up, the modern economy is primarily composed of things and services available for money, ratcheting to allow fewer and fewer non-monetary costs. When things are available for money, anyone can acquire them; this dilutes the information about the self that can be contained in the ownership. Similarly, a major trend in the labor market is toward fungible skills that anyone can supply, reducing opportunities for virtuosity and positive information about the self through work. Everything is increasingly available for money, except, I will argue, a major thing we all want to buy that gives us the feeling of meaning: our own value and specialness.
...
The mistake is to view hipsterdom as pure signaling. It invokes signaling, of course, but also the genuine, authentic search for value in genuineness and authenticity. The hipster is a person who is particularly alienated by the world of purely fungible culture. His music and books, his old "vintage" items, are more demanding, harder to find. But at the same time, he is made more interesting and valuable through what they demand from him.
...
The fungibility of work, the reduction of demand for long-developed special skills, the impossibility of virtuosity in one's limited job, has made work less and less a source of reliable, positive information about the increasing value of the self - because it has ceased to truly improve people. But people still desire to work at what they love, and to improve themselves. The market will sell them the feeling of this, but will not commonly supply them with food in exchange for pursuing virtuosity.

Going off on my own tangent, humans have two contradictory desires. We want to feel like we're valuable people living good lives, which itself is a massive and difficult subject. A good place to start is the famous video, The surprising truth about what motivates us. The other thing we want is for life to be easy, but there is a trade-off between a good life and an easy life.

This conflict comes into clearer focus as more work is automated. Do you want a machine where you push a button and food comes out, or do you want the challenge and personal empowerment of growing and preparing food with your own hands? This was not an issue in preindustrial civilization, when work was done by slaves and peasants. The lower classes suffered, but not from existential angst, and the elite felt important because they were ruling actual humans. Now there is a growing class of people who have no political power but are served by machines.

If the tech system can pass through the bottleneck of resource exhaustion (I think it can, but that's another subject) we might emerge into a high-tech utopia/dystopia, in which it's easy to be comfortable but difficult to be happy. Social class will no longer be about power or even standard of living, but valuable activity. The upper class will hold the few important jobs that still require humans. The middle class will be hobbyists, practicing difficult skills that are not necessary for society. And the lower class will be content to consume entertainment.

November 27.

2012-11-27T12:52:30Z

November 27. There were some comments on Sunday's links but I'm moving on. The History of Boredom has some good stuff. Most important, it has a precise definition: "a state in which the sufferer wants to be engaged in some meaningful activity but cannot, characterized by both restlessness and lethargy."

Notice how much this overlaps with some definitions of depression. I think that everyone who has gone to school, or otherwise been trained for an externally-driven life, has to pass through the desert of unmotivation while learning to motivate themselves internally. And the article has some stuff at the end about how it's good for you to have nothing to do.

Also, check this out:

A host of studies have found that people who are easily bored may also be at greater risk for depression, anxiety disorders, gambling addictions, eating disorders, aggression and other psychosocial issues. Boredom can also exacerbate existing mental illness. And, according to at least one 2010 study, people who are more easily bored are two-and-a-half times more likely to die of heart disease.

This raises the question, which cannot yet be answered except by guessing: what exactly makes different people more or less easily bored? Personally I'm so resistant to boredom that I sometimes fantasize about being in solitary confinement. My guess is that it's partly genetic, and the key environmental factor is how much free time you had in your first few years of life.

November 27.

2012-11-27T12:42:34Z

November 27. So a bunch of people have asked me for a recipe for my homemade sweet potato chips. I always say: slice them, throw in some olive oil and salt, bake them on trays in the oven, and I'll eventually make a page with more details. Here it is: sweet potato chips. It's really very simple except that it requires great attention to detail to get them all crunchy but not burnt.

November 25, late.

2012-11-25T12:14:43Z

November 25, late. Heading back to Spokane tomorrow. Here are some stray links. How To Live Without Irony is unfair to young people, and grossly simplifies what a "hipster" is, but it does have good advice about why and how to live without irony.

This BBC article about Marijuana legalisation in the US becomes as fascinating and disturbing as a car wreck when it briefly explores the coming world of cannabis brand marketing.

Dmitry Orlov's latest post about anarchy, The Practice of Anarchy, makes the sobering argument that a free system can only exist as a temporary state, cutting through a control system before becoming a control system itself. Related: Hakim Bey's famous essay on the Temporary Autonomous Zone.

And Schools should replace Catcher in the Rye with Black Swan Green.

November 22.

2012-11-22T12:51:08Z

November 22. Where I'm currently staying in Seattle, the only way I can get internet is by holding my laptop up to a window, so posting and emailing will continue to be light.

November 21.

2012-11-21T12:48:28Z

November 21. I've just been updating some of the recipes on my misc page, which some of you might find useful for Thanksgiving. I'm making gravy and stuffing as usual, plus a "pumpkin" pie with sweet potatoes that I pre-cooked in a pressure cooker, which is vastly more energy efficient than an oven. I remember back in the 1970's Thanksgiving was more commercialized, until the commercial interests figured out how little money they were making since people have to eat anyway, and started pushing Christmas earlier. I wish we had a lot more feast holidays.

November 20.

2012-11-20T12:33:48Z

November 20. The cutting edge in medium-term future forecasting, 2512 by Charlie Stross. If I'm making a cautious bet, I agree with pretty much all of it. The tech system will keep going, and there will be lots of crazy biotech, but no AI singularity and not much happening off-planet. The oceans will have risen and the more delicate species will be extinct, but there will still be plenty of biological life. The human population will be lower, the nation-state will be obsolete, and industrial-age capitalism will be dead. There's also a loooong comment section with many more ideas.

Taking a different angle on the nearer future, a Hipcrime Vocab post on Collapse and the Sorites Paradox, arguing that America is well into collapse but it's happening so gradually that people haven't noticed. The examples here are about economics, standard of living, and infrastructure.

I think these two visions are perfectly compatible. The depletion of nonrenewable resources has already begun to cause great hardship, but it will not plunge us back to medieval times. Large complex systems will stumble through a transition from nonrenewable to renewable resources, they will shrink both geographically and in range of functions, some will die, some will transform, and new systems will appear, and we'll be in a world with new wonders and new problems.

Related: the best green ruins image I've seen in a while.

November 18.

2012-11-18T12:47:13Z

November 18. Writing is hard. By popular demand, I've just wrestled two sloppy posts from November 6 and 8, about "being the change" and puritanical activism, into a form that's adequate for a permalink.

November 17.

2012-11-17T12:42:48Z

November 17. Between travel and Thanksgiving, I won't be online much for the next ten days, so posting and emailing will be light. Something personal that I've put off mentioning on the blog: as of early September, I'm no longer single. Her name is Leigh Ann, and like the two women I was with (briefly) before her, I met her through OkCupid. Before you give OkCupid too much credit, I had a 99% match with the other two and it didn't work out in person. Leigh Ann and I are only an 86% match. She first checked my profile one or two years ago, and I almost messaged her then, but she lived in New York City, her profile is intimidating, and I had a feeling we'd fight all the time. This summer I saw she was moving to Seattle, so I sent her a message and it's been smooth and easy ever since. We've been taking turns busing across the state, and she introduced me to my new favorite band: Moon Duo.

November 16.

2012-11-16T12:58:12Z

November 16. Two looks back at events earlier this month. Erik sends this article on The Civilizing Power of Disaster, using Hurricane Sandy to anchor a nice discussion of disaster utopias, and why we are more generous and feel more alive during a crisis.

And US election: What next for the Republican party? The article alternates between the idea, among outside observers, that the Republican party is doomed to decline as long as it represents a shrinking demographic of older white people, and the idea, among Republican insiders, that they can win if they become even more extreme and just do a better job of turning out voters. This is great news for America's center-right party, the Democrats. I'm wondering if I'll ever see a real left of center party in America, and if so, whether the Democrats will shift there, the Republicans will leapfrog there, or another party will rise as the Republicans fade -- just as the Republicans rose in 1860 to replace the Whigs.

November 15.

2012-11-15T12:46:40Z

November 15. I spent half the day scattering 80 bags of leaves all over my yard, and the other half revising Beyond Civilized and Primitive after an email critique by a reader. Here's his blog, Karl North Eco-Intelligence. I started by fixing a paragraph in which I used the word "evolve" to give the false appearance of biological inevitability to my purely cultural vision of a large complex society that maximizes ecological abundance. I also cut a paragraph near the end about natural selection dividing humans into multiple species, something I now think is only going to happen through biotech. I replaced another paragraph to be more fair to primitivists on the issue of civilization as a continuation of previous human changes. And I made a bunch of other little revisions. The newest version, 1.3, has links to the previous versions, and if anyone has enough free time to examine them in detail, I'm envious.

Coincidentally, also on the subject of recent human evolution, Jane sends this article by anthropologist John Hawks, Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evolution. Hawks never suggests that smaller brains have made us dumber, but you have to wonder.

November 14.

2012-11-14T12:29:25Z

November 14. Yesterday I got a great email about how Chinese students seem to be smarter than Americans because they do better on tests, but this is because their education system is completely teaching for the test, and they can't even imagine coming up with their own opinion and defending it. This reminds me of a story from a friend who was teaching English in some Asian country, and tried to get the kids to play hangman. Not one student would guess one letter, because their culture is about never being wrong. If American culture shifts too far in this direction, we're doomed, no matter how much oil we have.

Also, Anne comments on yesterday's humans getting dumber link:

What possible method could he propose for testing people dead 2000 years? The problem with people who propose non-falsifiable hypotheses is that they aren't talking science, and when "scientists" start talking non-science, you have to look for social and cultural narratives in their ideas.

November 13.

2012-11-13T12:01:18Z

November 13. And two more links about intelligence. Crippling Intellects is the new Do The Math post, and it rambles a bit, but there's a good story about an exercise in a game theory class, where some players were so "smart" that they could not imagine other players thinking differently. The larger point is that the most extreme visions of the future are based on the same kind of mistake.

Is pampered humanity getting steadily less intelligent? The idea is pure speculation, and it doesn't take a scientist to think of it: that humans are getting dumber (or genetically weaker in other ways) because the genetically unfit are no longer dying.

This reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about for two months: Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others. Here's a decent summary: Is Babysitting the Ultimate Source of Our Ability to Understand Each Other?

Hrdy starts with the observation that humans are nicer to each other than any other large primate, even bonobos. She looks at a bunch of explanations, and eventually argues that at some point in our history (for complicated reasons I won't get into) mothers started sharing the duties of raising children with other family members, especially maternal grandmothers. This led to a higher survival rate for children who learned to read the emotions of many potential caregivers, which led to a higher genetic potential for empathy.

Hrdy's book is mostly a lot of scaffolding to support several rockets that blast off in the final chapter. One shocker goes like this: for hundreds of thousands of years, it was easier for humans to get emotional support than food. So any child that did not have a rich and healthy emotional environment, also would not have had enough food, and would have died. But in civilization, it's normal for kids to be emotionally neglected and still survive to adulthood. This could explain increasing mental illness, depression, emotional detachment, and many other problems of modernity.

November 12.

2012-11-12T12:33:02Z

November 12. Three links about intelligence. From four years ago, a Russian immigrant takes an American IQ test and argues that IQ tests actually measure how standard and narrow your mind is. In two kinds of questions, crossing out the odd object in a list, and completing a sequence of numbers, many answers could be correct, but you only get points for the most obvious answer.

And a review of James R. Flynn's "Are We Getting Smarter?"

The pattern of rising IQ scores does not mean that we are comparing "a worse mind with a better one," but rather that we are comparing minds that "were adapted to one cognitive environment with those whose minds are adapted to another cognitive environment." Seen in this light, the Flynn effect does not reflect gains in general intelligence, it reflects a shift to more abstract thinking brought about by a changing social environment. We aren't getting smarter; we are getting more modern.

This raises the question: where are we going on this path? The primitivist answer is that modern abstract thinking is a dead end, it disconnects human culture from the rest of the world, and it will lead to collapse and a return to old-fashioned thinking. The "humanist" answer is that modern thinking is better, and when everyone catches up to American college professors, the world will stabilize into a new age of enlightenment. The transhumanist answer is that abstract thinking enables us to build technological life that will make humanity obsolete.

On this subject, Gabriel sends an article, Why I am Skeptical About Risks from AI. The author is both smarter than me and not a native English speaker, so there's a lot I don't understand, but it seems to be a great set of arguments for why an explosion in artificial general intelligence (AGI) is more difficult and unlikely than we think.

November 9.

2012-11-09T12:40:44Z

November 9. Stray links. In case you missed it, the big news today is that a campaign connected to Occupy Wall Street is buying debt and canceling it. I had no idea you could buy debt at such a high discount, in this case almost 30:1. Of course you can't buy your own debt that cheaply, but if an intermediate organization can, it opens up all kinds of possibilities, including selling debt cancellation at a profit, while still giving debtors a discount.

World's fastest number game wows spectators and scientists. Japanese kids learn to use an abacus, and then switch to a mental image of an abacus, leading to miraculous computing speed. I wonder what else this would work with.

From last week, in one of the greatest reddit comments ever, AnalogDan comments on how baseball would change if it were only played once a week, and then veers off into impressively honest rambling about his personal life.

And some fun doom news: Global warming may make reptiles smarter.

November 8.

2012-11-08T12:32:50Z

November 8. (edited permalink) Unexpectedly I have some time to write a follow-up on Tuesday's post. Personally I take "be the change you want to see in the world" at face value; so if you want to see gay marriage, you should be gay and get married. Sean comments that he interprets it more broadly, so straight people can support gay marriage "by loving and supporting gay people, by being outspoken and encouraging." I wouldn't stretch the quote that far, but it's an important point that you can change people's thinking with your behavior, even if you're not personally doing the thing that people will be doing in the world you're aiming for.

This gets more interesting when you apply it to other issues. For example, if you want people to eat less meat, you don't have to be vegetarian. I'm not joking! If you think I'm joking, it's because political action has fallen so deeply under the shadow of puritanism. You can communicate the horror of factory farms and the inefficiency of grain-fed animals, while still eating meat yourself. You can fly around the world on jet planes giving lectures about climate change. I'm still not joking! You can be a primitivist on the internet. You can kick out a Niketown window with a Nike shoe! And you're not doing anything wrong, you're not a hypocrite, unless you tell other people they're immoral for doing what you're doing.

Any movement that allows itself to be framed in terms of moral purity is doomed. If ending the exploitation of animals is about personally avoiding guilt, then anyone who speaks for animals can be dismissed as a fraud if they wear leather, or eat honey, or step on a bug. If reversing climate change is about reducing personal consumption, then the end of that path is to kill yourself. So here's another rule to modify "be the change you want to see": Do things that an alive person can do better than a dead person. (I first saw this idea on Ribbonfarm referencing Bruce Sterling.)

November 7.

2012-11-07T12:49:32Z

November 7. A few quick comments on the election. Note that Nate Silver's State-by-State Probabilities map (scroll down and look on the right) was correct in 50 out of 50 states.

The Democrats kicked ass in Senate races, winning every close race and picking up three seats. This is because tea-partiers have been purging the Republican party of moderates, and generally because Republicans have become a party of white men born before 1980, a shrinking demographic. But this is not a political victory for the left, because America has no political left. By European standards, the Democrats are a center-right party. This is a victory for the cultural left. I'm not sure how that can lead to better politics.

California, a liberal state, has soundly defeated labeling of genetically modified foods. My position is tricky. Like Michael Pollan, I support open-source genetic modification, and I would love to see thousands of garage biotech labs. But genetic modification at the moment is terrible, not because it's especially unsafe, and not so much because food is being controlled through intellectual property. It's because almost all the modifications currently being done are to make plants more compatible with large-scale energy-intensive monoculture farming. The lie is that science is making plants more productive, when really it's making plants more compatible with farming practices that are anti-ecological and economically authoritarian.

November 6.

2012-11-06T12:08:30Z

November 6. (edited permalink) Related to yesterday's topic, I think some people misunderstand Gandhi's famous statement, "Be the change you want to see in the world." For all I know Gandhi himself misunderstood it. It is not true that being the change you want to see in the world is a good way to change the world. Consider the only major issue on which American progressives have been winning over the last 35 years, gay marriage. First, how are straight people who support gay marriage supposed to be the change we want to see? And even gay couples, following that advice, would have emigrated to countries where they could get married. Instead they got organized and fought to change public opinion and change laws.

Or consider a minor victory. Seattle has a law now that stores have to charge you for bags. This is a lot more effective at getting people to bring their own bags, than doing it voluntarily and hoping other people imitate you.

It's only when you can't change the world, or can change it only very slowly, that "be the change" becomes good advice. I want everyone to convert their lawns to food forests, but it would be a waste of my energy to try to require that by law, or to get upset that other people aren't doing it. Instead I can be satisfied that I'm doing it myself.

November 5.

2012-11-05T12:27:35Z

November 5. Summary of my thoughts on American politics: 1) Obama is one of the few presidents in history with progressive values, exceptional political skills, and good character. 2) Nevertheless, the most visible policies of the American government over the last four years have been almost identical to the policies of the previous eight years, or really, any time since the 1970's.

3) This is not because Obama, or members of congress, are bad people. The awful truth is that they're mostly good people, but the system has so much inertia (on certain issues) that it is immune to good people in the offices that supposedly run it. There is nothing anyone can do to change broad-scale American foreign policy or economic policy, any more than you can stop an explosion halfway through.

4) At the same time, there are many small issues where good people can make a difference, even at the highest levels. Every day executives and legislators make thousands of subtle, invisible, and difficult decisions. They can't stop drone attacks in Pakistan, or the unprecedented imbalance of wealth and power, or the ossification and slow collapse of the American empire. But good decisions will make life better for a lot of people, which is why I think swing state citizens should vote for Obama, and everyone should generally vote for Democrats, but do your research, because sometimes the Republican is better. Also there are initiatives (my state might legalize cannabis and gay marriage this year) and state, county, and city offices.

5) Some people think voting is bad because you're giving moral support to everything the government does. This implies the following ridiculous scenario: "Mr. President, I'm receiving word that ____ has voted." "Excellent! Release another wave of drones!" I wonder if this style of thinking comes from bad families where the abusive parent twists any sign of support into justification for any action. Good families don't work that way because you can communicate what you agree with and don't agree with, and big systems don't work that way because nobody is listening.

6) More generally, this is the biggest mistake on the political fringes, and the most common misinterpretation of my own values: that A) we are engaged in a moral struggle, which B) we fight through personal morality, and C) the key to personal morality is avoiding guilt, D) through nonparticipation. No, No, No, No. I don't even believe in morality. The only moral rule is expansion of consciousness. Beyond that it's all tactics, and morality is tactics for dummies. Morality is a set of shortcuts for people who can't be bothered to figure shit out. The ultimate test of an action is what happens as a result of that action.

So, in terms of politics, a boycott is worthless unless you can organize enough people to use the boycott as a weapon to force a business to change its policies. Similarly, nonvoting is worthless unless you can organize millions of people to publicly pledge not to vote until a candidate supports your chosen reform -- but if you have that much organizational discipline, you have better moves than nonvoting.

And in terms of your personal life, riding a bicycle instead of driving a car will not prevent one billionth of a degree of climate change, but you'll get more exercise and save a bunch of money which you can then use to improve your life in other ways. It's okay to do things for your own benefit -- just don't think you're helping other people unless you actually are.

November 4.

2012-11-04T12:49:15Z

November 4. Sunday update on the election. I've been following Nate Silver, who is such a clear thinker and writer that it is a pleasure to read him on any subject. While the dominant media have been calling the presidential race a tossup, Silver has been projecting an increasing chance of an Obama win. From Thursday: The Simple Case for Saying Obama Is the Favorite. And from yesterday: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased.

Getting deeper, here's an important analysis, Why political journalists can't stand Nate Silver. Basically journalism is elitist. Journalists say, "We have access to sources that you don't, so you have to listen to us to get the Truth." Meanwhile Nate Silver takes information that's out in the open, reaches conclusions through a transparent process, and yet does not claim certainty, only probability. This undermines information authoritarianism in two ways, by making elite channels irrelevant, and by changing the way we think, so that we no longer go looking for certainty. And in this particular case, Silver's dissent makes the official story seem like propaganda: they must be saying the race is a tossup because that makes a more exciting story. Do they think their job is to fucking entertain us? (That's the President's job.)

Back to the original point, the difference between journalism by authority, and journalism by skilled processing of common experience, reminds me of religion and a hundred other subjects where elites try to set themselves up as the sole conduits of effective knowledge and action. The problem is, if anyone is allowed to do journalism, or diagnose illness, or talk to God, some idiots will do it badly, which justifies the elite saying that only they should be allowed to do it. Meanwhile, if the elite do it badly, it strengthens the case for letting idiots do it. The only way to pull out of this tailspin is for more ordinary people to get really good at stuff.

November 3.

2012-11-03T12:49:16Z

November 3. This morning I went to see Cloud Atlas. I enjoyed the novel and had high hopes for the film because of the director, Tom Tykwer. Everyone knows Run Lola Run, but I liked his following film, The Princess and The Warrior, even better. I can't complain about the directing of Cloud Atlas, and of course the acting is the most interesting thing, with so many actors playing multiple roles. Tom Hanks fulfills my long-time wish by finally, in one role, playing a pure villain. I believe Hugh Grant plays all villains, and Jim Broadbent is brilliant.

But I didn't like the adaptation. Splicing all the stories together is something anyone would have figured out, and beyond that, most of what they cut from the novel, and added to the film, was not to translate the story from novel to film, but to translate it from smart to stupid. If you see the film first, trust me, the novel has no heavy-handed messages or Hollywood bullshit. If they hadn't thrown so much money at action scenes that were not in the book, maybe they could have lowered the budget enough to not feel the need to dumb it down.

The technological politics are also worth mentioning. Through a plot contortion, they manage to turn the threat of a nuclear power disaster into a message that's pro-nuclear and anti-oil. The ending is also turned 180 degrees toward techno-optimism.

November 2-4.

2012-11-02T12:28:38Z

November 2-4. (permalink) In a Reddit thread about reality glitches, I made this post about White Rabbit, and how I'm sure I used to hear "feed your head" three times at the end, but now, in every version I can find, I only hear it twice. I'm not the only one. In the replies, Velinus finds two videos where the printed lyrics have it three times, and a few readers remember the same thing. Robert has no memory either way, but reports:

After you mentioned White Rabbit I decided to look up the lyrics online. All the lyrics I found on the major lyrics sites have the line "feed your head" repeated twice. I lost interest at this point and decided to get back to my work.

Now, there's a UNIX program called fortune. It basically just displays random quotations pulled from a database when it's run. I had set up our development server so that it runs when I log into the system. So, what should appear when I log in? The lyrics to White Rabbit with the "feed your head" line repeated 3 times!

And now, this is the top postcard on this weekend's PostSecret.

November 2.

2012-11-02T12:38:26Z

November 2. The range of definitions for "spirituality" is even broader than I thought. Daniel writes that it's not incompatible with materialism, and he defines it as "the processes by which human beings construct their own identities, interpret the identities presented to them by other human beings, and weave their perceptions into coherent narratives." And Anne, who belongs to a Reform Judaism synagogue, writes that it's not incompatible with religion, and "most of us at one point or another wonder just what is going on here with this whole existence thing."

November 1.

2012-11-01T12:29:47Z

November 1. (condensed permalink) Earlier this week my old friend Davis stayed three nights with me at the end of a fifteen month trip around the states. Here's his blog, The Hoop Tour, with a post about it.

At one point he asked me about spirituality, and I gave him a definition, something about rejecting philosophical materialism without following the centrally controlled beliefs of a religion. I asked Davis what "spirituality" means to him, and he struggled to define it without using the word "spiritual".

So now I'm wondering, when people talk about spirituality, what exactly are they talking about? If I had more time, I'd make a survey with hundreds of questions and give it to thousands of hippies. If I wanted to make them look stupid, I would ask questions to trick them into muddling the word up with culture and politics: What's more spiritual, a Prius or a Hummer? But if I wanted to understand them, I would ask for stories about the most spiritual and anti-spiritual parts of their lives. Then I might be able to analyze out some definitions, like "the feeling of engaging with a living universe" or "the yearning to be part of a larger story" or "absence of stress".

Underlying all of this, I think "spirituality" is how people refer to the gap between human nature and modern society. Our ancestors lived in close-knit extended families, imbedded in the spectacular complexity of wild ecosystems, viewing reality itself as full of awareness and intention. Now we grow up in neurotic nuclear families, work in office cubes, our closest engagement with nature is mowing the lawn, and we view consciousness as an accident in a mindless billiard-ball universe.

So how do we bridge the gap? This is such a hard question that almost everyone goes astray. We correctly observe that our society is fucked up, and then we get seduced by incorrect but beautiful stories about why it's fucked up and what we can do about it.

Eddie sends an article about where this can lead: European Yoga Porn Cult Establishes a U.S. Beachhead. The Movement for Spiritual Integration in Absolute (MISA) "recruits young women, often still in their teens, with the promise of a better spiritual life" and then gradually turns them into powerless sex workers. (By the way, "Where is the outrage?" is the most annoying sentence possible in English.)

As industrial civilization continues to decline, I expect all kinds of movements to appear, from exploitative cults, to unrealistic utopian crusades, to patient realignments of human culture, all of them feeding off the energy of people who are economically vulnerable and desperate to feel like they're part of a story. Eventually several of these movements will stabilize into dominant belief systems, and beyond that I'm not sure.

I don't think we're going to return to forager-hunter tribes, because there will be other options that we like better. Soon it will be easier to change human nature to fit society, than change society to fit human nature. But I don't think we can just do anything we want. I believe in a conscious universe, beyond humanity, beyond biology, even beyond physics, into which post-human nature and post-human society must ultimately fit. We're either going to change ourselves to extinction, or change ourselves to fit this universe through a new interface that we cannot yet imagine.

October 31.

2012-10-31T12:48:35Z

October 31. Two Halloween links from reddit: a thread asking what is the most "paranormal" thing you have ever experienced? And the The Truth is Here subreddit for weird stories that supposedly are not made up.

October 30.

2012-10-30T12:34:17Z

October 30. Some complainy links: The Plot to Destroy America's Beer, in which an evil capitalist buys beer companies and ruins them to temporarily increase the value of the stock.

There Is No Nobel Prize in Economics. It was tacked on without the consent of the Nobel family and is used to reward advocates for the giant blocks of money.

And Journalism in the Obama age shows the real media bias, always subservient to whoever happens to be in power. I think this is exactly what we should expect. All institutions, most culture, and many individuals, start out on the fringes, slip into serving the domination system, ossify and decay, while new life comes from the fringes and the whole cycle repeats.

October 28.

2012-10-28T12:05:26Z

October 28. Just permalinked, after extensive rewriting, two posts from a month ago, about control and status.