Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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January 6. Today, the future. Just discovered this great subreddit, Dark Futurology. "Automation, natural limits, and new inequalities will be the gamechangers of the 21st century."

An Artist Imagines the Techno-Evolved Creatures of the Future, "based loosely on current research on synthetic biology and genetic engineering." Whether this is utopian or dystopian depends on unintended consequences. Has someone invented a word, "something-topian", for when technology makes the world so crazy that it doesn't even make sense to ask if it's good or bad?

Emoya Estate: The Luxury Shanty Town In South Africa Offering 'Poverty Porn' For The Rich. For now this is about the rich, but suppose we recover from the ecological and economic catastrophes of the 21st century, and in one or two hundred years, everyone in the world is as safe and comfortable as the rich are now (but much less powerful). It might be normal to live in an "exotic hybrid of opulent luxury and extreme deprivation." Everyone wants to feel that their life is meaningful without taking real risks, but I'm not sure this is possible.


January 3, 2014. For the new year, some personal stuff. I'm always trying to move away from blogging so I can work on other projects, but it's very difficult for me to not blog, so I'll probably continue to do three posts a week and mostly avoid writing personal opinions that incite disagreements over email.

Leigh Ann has got me into college football, and I love it! No other sport has so much potential for shocking plays, and this has been the craziest bowl season ever. But I quit playing video games when I learned that Macaulay Culkin is 33 years old, because that means, in subjective time, that I'm going to die of old age in around seven minutes, and I can't afford to do anything that makes time seem to pass more quickly. If they ever event video games that seem to stretch out time, I'm back!

Cannabis seems to stretch out time, I can use it legally now, and later this year I'll be able to legally buy it. But I have to be really heavily stoned to enjoy it more than being sober, and I can't afford to use that much that often. Probably I'll settle into using it once a month. I've poked around online looking for ways to reset tolerance faster. Some people say that nothing works but time, but this page, Activating Cannabinoid Receptors, suggests that green tea can help, and also several essential oils including clove and lemon balm. We need more research on this important subject!

My bees in the backyard are still alive and have barely touched their massive honey stores. I think they're being a little too frugal and I hope they eat enough to survive until spring. Either way I'll have at least a gallon of honey.

I tried to sign up online for the new expanded medicaid, renamed Apple Health in my state, and kept getting an identity validation error, probably because I have no credit rating. Finally I borrowed a land line and spent almost an hour on the phone, and I'm in. As long as I keep my income below around $13k/yr, I can continue not paying into the medical system -- and probably not using it. I still think Obamacare is bad for the country, but it's good for me!

Finally, some music for the weekend, from an Italian electronic jazz duo: Satelliti - Transister.


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: politics are even dumber than sports, less transparent, much more rigged, and only slightly more meaningful. 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.





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