novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"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
December 31, late. For the end of 2013, a massive purge of links that I hadn't got around to posting yet.
A reader sends this page about media for thinking the unthinkable. I didn't watch the videos but I like the idea that the right symbolic tools can greatly enhance our thinking. One example is how tinker-toy 3D models enabled Watson and Crick to imagine DNA as a double helix.
Great reddit comment about learning to see beauty in the mundane world (using the tool of cannabis).
One of my favorite redditors is Drooperdoo. He's fascinated by ancient human ethnicity, and I don't think he's racist but he does give the benefit of the doubt to whatever idea is most interesting. Here's his latest summary of human ancestry and interbreeding, and an argument that the Buddha was white.
Why I like something as dumb and meaningless as professional sports. I would add a few points: Politics are even dumber than sports, less transparent, much more rigged, and only slightly more meaningful. And in basketball and football, college sports are better than professional because there's more room for exceptional plays. Also on the subject of sports, an argument for banning the helmet, because players would adjust by not tackling with their heads.
On my favorite political cause: Why we should give free money to everyone, and Moral Aspects of Basic Income.
Fun science article, A Universe Made of Tiny, Random Chunks. My only comment is: when will academic philosophy enter the 20th century? They're still taking
determinism seriously when it's based on a Newtonian clockwork model of reality that has been overturned again and again by newer science.
Dave Eggers argues that NSA surveillance is going to get worse, and that it will mostly be used not to stop violence but to intimidate citizens who threaten the ruling powers.
According to a new study, the brain can't empathize and analyze at the same time. Before you think "empathize good analyze bad," consider that analysis can simulate empathy more easily than empathy can simulate analysis. Related: letter from a recovered psychopath.
Hope for healthcare is about an independent hospital with low and transparent pricing, that threatens to undermine the American medical cartel. Related, an article about independent commuter airlines: I flew on a plane without going through security. It was amazing and no one died.
Finally (coming back to DNA and the Buddha) a new study shows that mindfulness practice can cause molecular and genetic changes.
December 30. Friday on the subreddit there was a thoughtful post about dropping out and how it can go wrong on the level of motivation. The main point is that some subcultures (for example primitivism) are ideological and moralistic, and following them can lead to spending years living how you think you should be living but finally you notice that you don't enjoy it. This reminds me of a famous inspirational quote that's worth repeating: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
Related: thanks Dena for sending this long blog post on Vaclav Havel and the Power of the Powerless. It starts with an example of a grocer in a totalitarian communist state, who is expected to put a "workers of the world unite" sign in the shop window, but the real message of the sign is: "authorities, I am obedient so don't crush me".
The next point is how surprisingly powerful it is if the grocer refuses to put the sign in the window. Havel's words:
He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
Now the state must either ignore the example of living the truth, or crush it. But crushing it just drives it underground, where eventually it reaches a critical mass and drives sudden changes that seem to come out of nowhere: "The Prague Spring wasn't the birth of something promising that was then cut down, but the above-ground blooming of something that continues to flourish underground."
How can we apply these insights to America, or to global technological civilization in general? This is a hard question and I'm leaving it open. But I will suggest how to frame it. The question is not what the system forces us to do that we hate, but what we feel like we should be doing, and not doing it feels both dangerous and liberating.
December 27. Collapse blogger Dmitry Orlov has a new project intended to make it easier to learn English. English is one of the easiest languages if you're only trying to hear and speak it, or read and write it, but not both, because the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is terrible. Project Unspell replaces written English with a new set of phonetic symbols, and then uses software to convert those back and forth between standard written English, so you could learn to speak it without the huge hassle of learning to spell it. I'm not sure how the system will deal with homophones like two/too/to, or heteronyms like lead, wind, or desert. Probably try to figure it out from context. Update: Orlov informs me that the system will simply ask the user which meaning they want.
In other blog news, Stuart Staniford's Early Warning is back after a three month break. Here's the latest post with a brief explanation and then some stuff about oil supply.
Also on the subject of energy, Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth? The author makes a great effort to be fair and consider why mass transit could still be a good thing even though it often burns more energy per passenger mile than cars. Another thing I take from it is that tiny electric vehicles might be the future of transportation -- unless it takes too many resources to manufacture as many as we need.
December 25. Because of the holiday I'm doing music links on Wednesday instead of Friday, and posting the same two as last year. The Abominable O Holy Night is the most hilariously bad vocal performance of all time. Basically it's an experienced music producer with good vocal control, packing every mistake that he has ever heard bad singers make into one song. That link goes to a blog post with an interview with the singer and a video of the song being performed by a cartoon zombie.
And my favorite serious Christmas song is Alex Chilton's Jesus Christ.
Also here's another good one, Sister Winter by Sufjan Stevens.
December 23. I'm happy to see more action on the subreddit. Last night was a post about "the nicest essay Ran never wrote". Closely related, four days ago was a post about TED-ism and Ran Prieur-ism, and how my early writing was too simple and optimistic. The essay linked in the first post, Take what you need and compost the rest, is exactly the kind of thing I would have written in 2005 and would not write now. For one thing I no longer use the word "civilization" because it's both vague and value-loaded. That's perfect for attracting attention, but once I've defined the word and fought a semantic war about my definition, I realize I still haven't said anything until I use the precise and value-neutral language that I should have used in the first place. Also I've changed my forecast of what's really going to happen, from an inspiring steampunk stone age hybrid, to a painful global depression with some fun stuff happening at the fringes.
Also on the subreddit, a post about learned musical taste. In my post on Friday I mentioned culturally programmed taste and innate biological taste, but the comment points to something I missed: taste that is changed by listening, by developing your brain's potential to hear and appreciate more stuff. For example, I remember the first time I heard Sonic Youth it just sounded like noise, and now it sounds good. Conversely, something that sounds beautiful to a beginner might sound insipid to an experienced listener. This even suggests a way to put off the very difficult question of objective vs subjective quality: we can define "good music" as whatever the people who have listened the most like the most.
Doesn't science work the same way? By limiting observation to experience that can be called up at will, and that is the same for everyone, we are defining "truth" as whatever is experienced with the greatest consensus.
December 20. It's Friday so I'm writing about music. Every year my girlfriend makes a mix of her favorite songs of the year (or sample songs from her favorite albums). Here are her 2013 gems. The host site doesn't allow you to view the list without listening, but the artists are Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs, Jake Bugg, Woodkid, Anna Meredith, Janelle Monae, Of Montreal, Ahmad Jamal, Islet, Suuns, Melt Yourself Down, Teeth of the Sea, Temples, Jacco Gardner, The Child of Lov, His Clancyness, TV on the Radio, and Sons of Kemet. I've YouTube linked my four favorites.
I also have some thoughts about musical taste, and how many layers there are. The layer most removed from the actual music is identity-building: people decide to like a category of music because it represents something they want to be associated with. So American liberals want to like world music, hipsters want to like obscure music, and so on. On the next deeper layer, you learn to like what your friends like. Then on the next layer, you like what your family and culture have trained your ear to like.
The next layer is what your ear likes independently of training -- or more precisely, what your brain is good at processing and thereby appreciating. I've been reading Oliver Sacks's book Musicophilia, and he mentions the huge difference in how many simultaneous tracks different brains can deal with. At one extreme is Beethoven, who could mentally imagine an entire orchestra. At the other extreme is someone like me. My visual imagination is powerful, but it's difficult for me to imagine the sound of two instruments playing at once, and four is impossible. Now I know why I don't like any music with more than about six instruments -- because they're going to be working together in a way that I can't even hear.
But I have a good ear for rhythm, which is why I hate one-TWO-three-FOUR pop drumming, but love the complex drumming on the Sons of Kemet link above. I have a bad ear for notes at the same time but a good ear for notes in sequence, so I can hear a wide variation in quality of vocal melodies. And I have a good ear for timbre, which is what makes the same note sound different on different instruments. That's how I can tell that Alex Lifeson's best guitar sound was on Caress of Steel, and that Joanna Newsom destroyed her voice between her first and second albums.
Now we're getting into philosophy, because how do I know that isn't all subjective? One of the most interesting bits in Musicophilia is the story of a girl "who had absolute pitch... supple fingers... and she could read everything in sight" but failed as a musician because "she did not know good music from bad." Sacks just lets that observation slide, as if we should all agree that there is such a thing as objective musical quality. How could that be? And how wide is the range in which certain music is absolutely better? One human culture? Universal human brain construction? Or something deeper? I have some ideas but for now I'm keeping them to myself.
December 18. More links. First, a great rant about TED-ism. If you don't know what TED is, here's the TED Wikipedia page. Basically it's a wealthy techno-optimist circle jerk. Condensed highlights:
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.
December 16. Lots of links stacked up. Today, some stuff about changing how we use our time. According to this reddit comment about doing nothing: "You are doing things all the time, your brain never takes a break. But when you 'do nothing' you finally allow your brain to breathe and process all the things it needs and wants to process."
From the NY Times, The Case for Filth. The issue is framed in terms of gender roles, arguing that housework should be equalized, not by men doing more, but women doing less:
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.
December 13. Over on the subreddit I've just started an open thread for further discussion of urban suburban rural collapse issues. On this page I'm moving on to a tangential subject: collapse ecology.
What Happened On Easter Island -- A New (Even Scarier) Scenario. There is evidence that Easter Islanders didn't stupidly cut the trees down and die off. Instead, they accidentally brought rats that destroyed the local ecosystem, and then they seem to have adapted and survived comfortably until the population crashed from European diseases. The author thinks this is scary because humans did fine on a nearly dead island, and it would be depressing if we did the same thing globally.
From the same blog, Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not Even A Bee. It's about a photographer who drops one cubic foot frames in different places and photographs every living thing that can be seen there. Then in an industrial cornfield, he had to look much farther than one cubic foot to find much less. I don't see this changing until the culture of farming changes, which could take hundreds of years. Maybe they'll invent tiny robots that kill even the ants and grasshoppers.
Now some good news. Bee Researchers Make Friends with a Killer. In Latin America, Africanized "killer bees" have crossed with European honey bees to produce a range of new subspecies that are more valuable than either original species.
And this is still in the works, but it looks promising: Insect Farming Kit Lets You Raise Edible Bugs.
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.
December 11. I'm going to try to finish off this subject with a few more comments. First, Jon mentions something I hadn't considered: that newer suburbs have had the topsoil stripped off and sold, so food plants would be dying or barely surviving on dead subsoil. Of course there are ways to build topsoil, including growing dynamic accumulators like comfrey and dandelion, and bringing in biomass like leaves and wood chips. When you consider that Americans are in the habit of poisoning dandelions and removing leaves, this would add to what is already the biggest obstacle to changing the world: the difficulty of changing human culture.
I should also distinguish between two subjects in the whole rural-suburban-urban-collapse question. One is what you are capable of doing, and the other is what your neighbors are likely to do. This varies between regions, so if you can afford land in the Willamette Valley your neighbors might help you, but in most places they'll drag you down. Gene comments on his experience growing up in rural Minnesota:
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.
December 9. Continuing on last week's subject, Anne comments on the history of growing food:
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.
December 5. I've been thinking more about my statement last Friday that urban people will do better than rural people in a collapse. A reader pointed out that rural people did better in Weimar Germany. Also they did well during the decline of Rome. So the answer depends on a lot of things. Here's a thought experiment: what changes would be necessary for rural people to do better than urban people in a 21st century American collapse?
First we need a collapse scenario. I'm going to say that liquid fuels continue to decline, renewable energy cannot replace them nearly fast enough, and everything that now depends on liquid fuels gets much more expensive. This contributes to decades of zero or negative economic growth. Another contributor is the de-monetization of labor: a lot of the economic growth of the 20th century came from taking labor that used be outside the money economy, like child care and food preparation, and bringing it into the money economy. This is going to reverse as people lose their jobs, do stuff at home for free instead of paying other people to do it, those people lose their jobs, and so on.
New money-making opportunities will be snatched by whoever is in the best position: mostly the already rich. We will shift to a serf economy, where only the very rich can afford to buy other people's time, and they buy a lot of it. Still, most of us won't starve. It's in the interests of the elite to redistribute just enough wealth that we don't violently revolt. Eventually this will take the form of an unconditional basic income, but Americans will resist this for decades, mostly because the second lowest class can't bear the emptiness of life without the lowest class to look down on. For the same reason, we will put off the inevitable mass-cancellation of personal debt.
So here's America of 2030: you have to jump through hoops (creating terrible bureaucratic jobs) to qualify for government assistance mostly in the form of junk food and antidepressants, you have massive unpayable debts (creating terrible jobs at collection agencies), you've been evicted a few times and been in some tactically useless political protests (creating terrible jobs for cops), you don't have a car but you occasionally rent a self-driving car, you make some cash on the side selling overpriced handmade arts and crafts, you spend your cash on alcohol and cannabis, and you spend most of your time looking for affordable sources of decent food and other necessities, and consuming high-tech entertainment.
Given this scenario, what would it take for rural life to be better than urban life?
It would seem that rural people have the advantage in access to food. But right now almost all farmland is used for industrial monocultures. You can't trade extra goat milk for extra cabbages from your neighbors if you're surrounded by fifty miles of cornfields controlled by Cargill. So you'd have to produce everything you want to eat on your own land, which is difficult even with unlimited resources. For rural life to be better, the giant farms would somehow have to be broken up and resettled with many small independent farmers, and they would all need housing. But an easier path to basically the same thing, would be for people already living in mid-density urban and suburban neighborhoods to convert their yards to food production. Realistically, nobody will have to grow all their own food, because we'll all have access to low-quality industrial food -- this summer I was already buying Grocery Outlet white flour. You'll only need to grow enough high-quality food to stay healthy, and a yard is big enough.
Next, rural people would need equal or better access to non-food items. This was easier in the olden days when we had fewer non-food needs and more skills in making them. Even as recently as Weimar Germany, there were a lot more people who could make brooms and axes, who didn't mind wiping their butts with leaves, who didn't need a cabinet full of meds, and who wouldn't get bored sitting under a tree for a few hours. To match that today we would need radical cultural changes, or extremely powerful 3D printers everywhere. Otherwise it's going to be easier to get stuff if you're closer to the supply lines, which will come first to cities with seaports and rail hubs, then by expensive trucking to other cities, and finally to small towns.
I'm going to give rural people the benefit of the doubt on human community. If information technology keeps getting more powerful, then we'll all be overwhelmed with social media friends, and starving for face-to-face friends, wherever we live. But if you expect a tech crash, then the country can only match the city with extremely unlikely massive resettlement and cultural change.
Finally, we need economic opportunities, ways to trade our time and skills for money and stuff. Here the advantage of being rural is that you might have enough land to grow a surplus of food and sell or trade it. But this only works if you can get the food to buyers, and remember that fuel will be more expensive and roads will certainly be in worse condition. Because rich people will have all the money, you'll want to sell stuff directly to rich people, who will live around the cities. Again, the best hope for rural life is if information technology increases the number of non-physical goods and services, and makes location irrelevant.
December 2. Two reddit comments from Erinaceous (who by the way is not a woman named Erin, but a guy referencing the latin name for the hedgehog family). This one lists thirty links about ecological economics. And this great comment is about capitalism as an evolutionary system using power as the foundation rather than fitness.
I think it was a mistake to use the word capitalism because it leads to semantic arguments about whether an imaginary better society is or is not "capitalist". But the idea is that under low energy flows, human systems are like trees, growing slowly, minimizing waste, and integrating with the ecosystem; under high energy flows, human systems are like annual weeds, gobbling energy to grow fast and maximize output. So the more energy a society has, the worse it is! And maybe the end of the oil age will be good for us.
Another factor is whether the energy flows are centrally controlled or democratic. That's why I'm against nuclear power, because so far it can only be done in central plants, instead of everyone having a micro-reactor in their house. (For the same reason, I'm against genetic engineering until everyone can do it.) Solar panels are potentially democratic, but I expect the control systems to push for giant centralized plants. Cynically, I expect another energy boom in the next century, with more and more of the planet being covered with solar plants, with the energy feeding more political inequality, more waste, more insulation from reality, and more artificial needs than ever before.
Loosely related, a link I've been saving all year for winter: The Fireplace Delusion argues that burning wood in your fireplace is unnecessary and terribly polluting. But in my region, with cold winters and dry summers, dead wood builds up faster than it decomposes into soil, and forest fires are part of the ecology. So if I cut up a few dead trees and bring them back to burn in the fireplace, I'm just making smoke that would have been made anyway, and it allows me to be less dependent on the money economy and the oil companies. Rather than phasing out wood heat, we need to design and build more efficient stoves, like rocket mass heaters.
November 29. Recently I've had a few reader comments about how I gave up on the homesteading thing. Here's how I explained it in one email:
"I learned by actually trying it how hard it is. And I noticed that people I knew who had gone back to the land in small groups were unhappy compared to people in the city. In practice, most back-to-the-landers end up being little developers, or remote suburbanites. They still drive into town for food and supplies, they have to drive much farther, they cut down a lot of trees, and the only advantage is a better view."
There are several reasons people want to go "back to the land": 1) They hate the city because they have a low tolerance for chaos. But wild nature has even more chaos! 2) They imagine that rural people will do better in a collapse. But historically urban people have done better, because cities densely concentrate skills, items, and economic opportunities. 3) They overestimate their introversion, and how happy and sane they can be in prolonged isolation. 4) They feel, correctly, that rural self-sufficiency will make their life more meaningful. But this is a young person's problem and a young person's solution: to trade massive physical labor for meaning. Older people have less energy, and more ability to create their own meaning, or to find it in more subtle things.
5) They feel, correctly, that human civilization is a big pile of mistakes. But it doesn't follow that trying to get physically outside it is a good move -- especially not for humans. We're an adaptable species, and adaptable nonhumans like crows and grey squirrels are thriving in human settlements. I think the best move is to stay physically close to the center, but mentally on the fringes. Or as the ancient Christians said, "in the world but not of it."
And here's some music for the weekend, an improved version of my favorite song from a video game, Retro Remix Revue - Gerudo Valley.