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.
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.