I was at a presentation that a friend, an astrophysicist, gave to a potential donor. I thought the presentation was lucid and compelling. After the talk the sponsor said to him, "You know what, I'm gonna pass because I just don't feel inspired... you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell."
At this point I kind of lost it. An actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.
Part of my work explores deep technocultural shifts, from post-humanism to the post-anthropocene, but TED's version has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It is placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to re-affirm the comfortable. "Innovation" defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo.
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff. We need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us.
At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest things that make us feel good but which don't work, and don't invest things that don't make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.
Next, a few days ago on reddit Erinaceous made this knowledge-packed comment about peak oil, including eleven links to sources, and the next day on the collapse subreddit there there was a comment thread about that comment, How much time do we have before peak oil? Basically, even if there are plenty of fossil fuels in the ground, the rate at which they can be pumped out and burned will inevitably decline, and when the decline rate hits about 2%/year, maybe around 2017, the global economy goes haywire in ways that are too complex to predict.
Loosely related: Cars Kill Cities is a good introduction to the Progressive Transit blog.
Finally, last night I read about the Harvard student who used online anonymity tools to make a bomb threat to get out of a final exam, and they caught him. My immediate question: If you need to be anonymous on the internet for a good reason, are you doomed? Or is it still possible and this guy was careless? The answer is that he was careless, and these two comment threads, on hacker news and reddit, explain how.
Domesticity is the macho nonsense of women. And, in this light, it is not surprising that men have not started doing more of it. Men might be willing to lose the garbage of their own gender stereotypes, but why should they take on the garbage of another? ... Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution, where apathy is the most progressive and sensible attitude.
Actually, I bet we could come up with a lot more political problems with that solution. For example, if we end the arms race of "raising awareness", I think we would have a more accurate awareness of what's important, with much less effort.
Anyway, three more links about ending wage labor. Rethinking the Idea of a Basic Income for All, pointing out that it's surprisingly popular among Libertarians. (I expect it will be surprisingly unpopular among the lower middle class, because they would no longer have the lower class to look down on.)
Why Work As We Know It May Be Immoral, mostly about how automation should be reducing our workload if it weren't for useless busywork jobs.
And finally (thanks Gabriel), a great Charlie Stross comment about non-monetized self-actualization. Condensed excerpt:
]]>Rather than a society in which everyone "works", we should be aiming for a society in which everyone has the opportunity for as much self-actualization as they can cope with. This sounds similar to libertarianism, but the key difference is that money is not the sole yardstick of human success or value. It requires some organizational framework to arbitrate between the competing desires of the participants, and a money-based market is not a sufficient mechanism to settle such disputes if we expand the scope to include non-monetizable items such as subjective happiness, artistic merit, or friendship.
]]>The United Nations, in encouraging insect consumption, points out that insects, such as crickets, require six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep and two times less than pigs to reap the same amount of protein. On the whole, they're much easier to raise.
]]>One of the largest subsets of people in the area in which my parents reside is upper-middle-class folks building McMansions in the middle of nowhere, or in some cases in little "suburbs" that have cropped up literally in between cornfields over the past 15 years or so. These people buy absolutely everything they need in town.
Then there's the extreme opposite end of the spectrum... the rural poor. They work construction or whatever else they can find in the summer, or maybe somebody has a job in Alexandria or Fergus Falls working at Walmart or something. They drink a lot of booze, have a lot of guns, and police visits due to domestic violence are common. These folks have few practical skills outside of hunting and fishing, and their style of either requires a steady supply of manufactured goods. I expect them to be very dangerous folks in a collapse... this culture has fucked them up pretty bad, and many of them have lots of ammo stockpiled.
Okay, so there's the farmers. These canny, down-to-earth rednecks will keep people fed and hold things together... right? If you think that you're still living in the 1970s. Farmers today are technicians. They know how to operate heavy machinery, apply the correct mixture of fertilizer and herbicide to grow Monsanto seeds, and provide animals with the appropriate mixture of manufactured feed. We're at least two generations out from farmers who could get by without that stuff. Worse, they're all specialists now. Most dairy farmers I know these days are buying 100% of their feed. The multi-skilled farmer is long dead. The farmers wife, with her garden and her homemade pies? Fuggedaboudit. She's working a job in town, and the farm wouldn't survive if she wasn't. The modern farmer feeds himself and his family with income, NOT what he produces from his land.
It used to be that cities could only survive with an abundant countryside, and there's still some truth to that... but now it's equally true that rural people can't survive without stuff manufactured in the city. It's going to take generations of relearning for this to reverse itself. In short, I expect urban dwellers to do way better in all but the most extreme collapse scenarios... and in the extreme scenario both city dwellers and rural people are going to be equally fucked.
Generally you have things that you produce for yourself, and then if you are a farmer, you make one thing in quantity to sell. You don't tend to see a lot of diversity in one region though -- you grow cabbages, probably your neighbor does too.
The real determination isn't "where can I produce enough food" but rather "where can I find consumers for whatever I produce." Weavers and musicians used to be nomadic for a reason -- the consumers of their production lived in dispersed manors. If the future is really about "selling overpriced handmade arts and crafts" or massages or herbalism or medical care or whatever, you need to be able to get to where the 1% are, which is exurbs, while still having the space to grow your thousand-square-feet of kale and carrots to keep from dying of an all-corn diet. Basically, the future is the inner ring suburbs.
And Aaron sends this article from 2008, Can We Stay in the Suburbs? The suburbs already contain the housing and the land distribution for people to grow their own fruits and vegetables. I would add that even most residential neighborhoods inside cities have enough land. My lot is 7000 square feet.
Still, I do not expect home gardens to replace industrial agriculture, at least not in America. One reason is cultural intertia. Remember the Vikings in Greenland who died of starvation rather than eat fish. Suburban Americans have their very identities bound up in their lawns. Most of them would rather keep the lawn and risk physical death, than experience certain ego death by destroying the lawn. The other reason is that industrial agriculture is not dying. Here's an important article, also from 2008, Why Peak Oil Actually Helps Industrial Agriculture. Basically, economies of scale give larger farms the advantage as resources become scarce, and they will outcompete almost all other commercial producers.
This explains my problem with farmer's markets. Now, over the last few years, I've bought half a pig, half a cow, 75 pounds of apples, 100 pounds of lentils, and more than 100 pounds of wheat from local farmers. The reason, in every case, was that they gave me a better deal than Costco or Grocery Outlet. But I barely even go to farmer's markets because they're so expensive. When I look at the prices and the class of people shopping there, it's clear that farmer's markets and CSA's are not a way to feed the masses; they're a way for small farmers and artisans to eke out a living by connecting to people with money.
As the ongoing collapse deepens, and more of us are financially constrained, we might see a decline in small farms and farmer's markets as more people eat at the extremes: cheap industrial food to not starve, and home-grown produce to stay healthy. So, going back to the original urban vs rural subject, you don't want to be in the inner city but you don't need to be in the sticks. You need access to a little bit of land and a little bit of money. And if you want to help others, the best angle is to make it easier for urban people to grow food: by turning vacant lots into community gardens, and by relaxing legal restrictions to chickens, goats, bees, composting, and so on.
]]>"It's not a question of, 'Here's a drug that's going to fix you,'" Mate explains. "It's, 'Here's a substance under the effect of which you'll be able to do a kind of self-exploration that otherwise might not be available to you, or otherwise might take you years to get to.'"
]]>When I was in school, there was one girl who epitomized all-American girl-next-door cheerleader. She was gorgeous with blue eyes, long blonde hair, perfect body, and always had this 100 watt smile. She was on Homecoming court, and so was her little sister. Her family was prominent locally: the stay-at-home mom ran the PTA, the dad had a prestigious job.
This girl was on a parent-imposed diet since at least 3rd grade, despite never being fat. If she or her sister sassed her parents or got less than a B+ on an assignment, they were told they were "dogs" and they were forced to crawl around the house and eat their food from dog bowls under the kitchen table.
]]>I like to think that thinking is better than reading as a first step to understanding a topic, but I haven't read a lot about this. ... Calling your mother on Mothers' Day tells her less about your affection than calling her any other day of the year. ... It is best to celebrate unimportant things, so that everyone else doesn't also love them and remove the information from your signal. ... There is no correlation between the verdicts of different wine competitions because if there were, there would be space for fewer wine competitions. ... The process of science could be taught better in the realm of unanswered questions that students care about, rather than answered questions that they don't care about. ... Loyalty is the only commonly approved form of extremism.