Ran Prieur

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

- Terence McKenna

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April 4. Some fun stuff and culture for the weekend. NPR did a brilliant April Fools prank. They posted an article with the title Why Doesn't America Read Anymore? But the text of the article was just a few sentences explaining that it was a trick to catch people commenting on articles they hadn't read. Now that the joke is out, all the top comments are commenting on the gag, but these articles at Gawker, Uproxx, and Kotaku show some hilarious comments by people who got fooled.

My girlfriend has the best aesthetic taste in the world (and she says I'm the clumsiest person in the world). Specifically, her musical taste is so acute that she can make judgments with one listen that I don't come around to until five or six listens over several months. I've just put one of her favorite albums, I Am Alive and You Are Dead by Orphans & Vandals, at the top of my albums page. Have you ever noticed that "adult" means porn in everything but music, and in music it means bland? Why is that? Anyway, the song Mysterious Skin is adult music in two senses: it has sexually explicit lyrics, and it has such maturity and depth that it makes Bohemian Rhapsody sound like a song for children.

Leigh Ann also introduced me to the novelist Albert Cossery. A month or two back I mentioned his book A Splendid Conspiracy. Now I've read his most famous book (and probably the only one you'll find on ebook sites), The Jokers. That link goes to my Goodreads review. Something I don't mention there is that Cossery's perspective on politics and society reminds me of Tolkien and the One Ring. Cossery's view of violent revolution (or even entering politics as a reformer) is like Tolkien's view of trying to use the Ring for good: no matter how good your intentions, you're only feeding evil. There's no real-world analog to Tolkien's idea of destroying the Ring, but Cossery is like Tom Bombadil: he sees through corruption so clearly that it's not a threat to him, only a joke.


April 2. Loose ends from Monday. Someone has made a lengthy and angry subreddit post defending Amazon. I'm mentioning it here because I want to reward people who disagree with me on the subreddit instead of sending me an email. To be fair to Amazon, some of their prices are exceptionally low, and I've spent thousands of dollars on them over the lasts few years -- but I've spent a lot less since they raised the free shipping threshold from $25 to $35. And when I commented on that change a few months ago, I said the same thing as our Amazon defender: that rising transportation costs made it inevitable.

Calling Amazon "eeeevil" is an exaggeration for fun, but in a few years it might not be an exaggeration, if they continue to overwork their employees, drive competitors out of business, and jack up prices when they have a monopoly. They haven't done the last thing yet but they will if they can because it's corporate nature. I'm guessing that Amazon will be the third or fourth most evil company of the 2020's. The most evil company will have to be Google because they rose to power under the slogan "Don't be evil."

Also, on the subject of fire as the thing that made us human, a reader adds: "Once you have a fire, then people are going to gather around it for the light and the warmth, and now you have a captivated audience for all sorts of purposes." So fire must have led to more storytelling, and more transmission of culture across generations. Also in Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others, she argues that fire made large root vegetables digestible through cooking, which led to a role for experienced older women digging up roots, which kept those women around longer to drive the shift to collective child care, which Hrdy thinks was the key to humanity's success.


March 31. Today I'm starting a new feature of the blog. I don't want to feed a mental state of victimhood and outrage, so I often avoid posting links where the main content is "Look at those bad people doing those bad things." But sometimes you want to know that stuff, and sometimes it's fun to write about. So from now on I'm going to save up those links and post them all together on the last Monday of every month. I call it Finger-Pointing Day.

First, let's look at the eeeevil Amazon.com. Amazon's War On The House Of Otto is about a German corporation that has been very successful while treating it's workers well, and now Amazon is cutting into their business through the economic efficiency of squeezing the life from its workers. At the same time, Amazon is exploiting its customers by making Amazon Prime worse, charging more money for fewer benefits -- unless you count the streaming video benefits designed to compete with Netflix. The article continues with more examples of tech giants making their products worse to try to move into the territory of their competitors.

Another example: Apple has done everything it can to put independent repairers out of business, so that Apple has a monopoly on repairing its own products. More generally, any person or system that is both selfish and powerful, will try to leverage its power into more power, typically by limiting your freedom to do anything that works against it.

But don't blame the one percent. This article in the Atlantic argues that the real villains are the top tenth of one percent, or even the top one percent of the top one percent. In the shocking third chart you can see that the bottom half of the top one percent has lost ground since the 60's and 70's. So about half of the "one percenters" have been screwed over by even richer people.

Something less weighty (literally), this reddit comment explains how Breyer's ice cream has burned its brand for profit, replacing expensive and healthful cream with synthetic chemicals and cheap fillers that allow them to whip more air into the frozen dessert (no longer technically ice cream) so they can charge you dollars a pound for air. Most depressing of all, some fool consumers are being tricked into liking it.

Finally, going big again, George Monbiot argues that Humans are diminutive monsters of death and destruction, and not just civilized humans, but that we've been ruining the planet for more than a million years. I believe, following an idea in John Livingston's book Rogue Primate, that the key event was not walking upright, but fire. There's a popular idea that our caveman ancestors used fire to scare predators away. But think about it. If deer learned how to make fire, would wolves be scared away, or would they learn to follow the smoke to their next meal? When our ancestors tamed fire, they began announcing their presence to all other animals, and then they had to become the deadliest animal in the world.

You can see the depressing result in this XKCD comic, Earth's land mammals by weight.


March 28. Good news and fun stuff for the weekend. My city, Spokane, has just greatly expanded urban farming. I'm not planning to raise goats or pigs myself, but if my fruit trees ever make more than I can eat, I can now sell the excess from an unlicensed stand in my driveway.

Recipe for a Happy Life: Less Materialism, More Gratitude. Sometimes when I'm falling asleep at night I try to count fifty things I'm grateful for. (Other times I count wishes.)

And this is easily the best fiction I've ever seen on reddit: KhanneaSuntzu comments on what would happen to the world if Cthulhu showed up.


March 26. Today, technology. Spy Kids is a Charles Stross piece from last year, arguing that government surveillance agencies are being undermined by generational cultural changes, in which the spies will have less and less loyalty to their employers, and more loyalty to themselves or to higher values. (One nit-pick: since most "generations" are defined as spanning 18-20 years, then unless everyone has all their kids at age 18-20, it's not true that the Boomers are the parents of Gen X are the parents of Millennials and so on. It's about equally likely that parents and kids will skip a generation.) Anyway, even if new human generations make the NSA obsolete, I expect the control systems to also spawn new generations that remain in control.

For example, Facebook has acquired Oculus VR. That link goes to the Hacker News comment thread. Oculus VR is the company developing Oculus Rift, a cutting-edge head-mounted virtual reality system that techies were really excited about, and now some of them are crushed that Facebook has bought it, and some of them are trying to convince themselves that we're still on the path to utopia. You know the line from The Matrix, "a prison for your mind"? Virtual reality doesn't have to be a prison for your mind, but of all the possible uses for VR, that's the one that best serves the powers that are now making the decisions about how VR and other technologies will be developed and used.

This reddit comment suggests a possible antidote to virtual reality dystopia, but I expect it to remain uncommon: forcing unstructured time on your kids.

I literally pushed them out the door. Five minutes went by, them sitting on the front stairs moping. Then they tied to get back inside. "This is boring. There is nothing to do outside." I closed the door in their cute little disappointed faces. This process repeated and went on for some time. Eventually they got so bored they started playing. Just like that. And here I realized and remembered something from my own childhood. The best times I ever had was when I was really bored, with a bunch of friends with nothing to do.

Related: What Is Post-Internet Art? As an alternative to art that only exists inside computers, some artists are now using technology to create art with an enduring physical presence.

And a bunch more high-tech: 20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know. There's way too much here for me to try to comment, but I will say that most of these things would not be stopped by energy decline, economic collapse, or climate catastrophe. They would develop in parallel with all that -- unless they're stopped by being half-baked ideas in the first place.


March 24. You've probably seen Steven Pinker's argument that the world is getting less violent, because violent death rates are dropping. This View from Hell post, Homicide Rates, Suicide Rates, and Modern Medicine, argues that this is an illusion caused by high-tech medicine saving victims who would previously have died. "From 1931 to 1998, the United States homicide rate dropped by about 25%. But during that time, rates of aggravated assault increased by about 700%." Meanwhile the suicide rate continues to rise, and Sister Y speculates that "in the absence of modern medicine, up to ten times as many people who poison, cut, hang, or suffocate themselves might succeed."

The deeper problem here is that our culture is obsessed with avoiding death and acute physical injury, while being unaware of the grinding emotional trauma of going to school, looking for a job, being deep in debt, and generally being treated like cattle in a giant scheme to concentrate wealth and power ever more densely at the center.


March 21. Anne comments on yesterday's subject:

What I remember from ecological modeling is that models almost always crash, even when modeling systems that are robust in the real world. Mathematically, you could say that a model progresses to a stable attractor and, for obvious reasons, most attractors in synthetic systems are boundary conditions - the point at which there are no rabbits, or all the biomass is trees. These never happen in real life because correction factors exist that are negligible except in extreme circumstances (and consequently impossible to model accurately). Saying that this model predicts a crash just means it doesn't account for everything that happens when some other factor goes to eleven.


March 20. There's a lot of buzz about a Nasa-funded study predicting collapse. The main thing it shows is that economic inequality weakens the system, because the elites remain unaware of how resource depletion is affecting everyone else. But the study's model lacks the complexity to show how the coming changes could actually play out. Instead it talks vaguely about "collapse" without even making distinctions between economics, politics, and technology. My forecast remains what it was two months ago: global economic collapse, crushing poverty, widespread political chaos, but crappy subsidized food will keep you from starving, you'll still have to pay taxes, and high tech will continue creating new distractions and opportunities.


March 18. Unrelated links. Here's a fascinating speculation about that missing airliner, that MH370 shadowed SIA68, another airliner bound for Barcelona, to sneak through the airspace of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and then veered off to a landing in Turkmenistan, Iran, China, or Kyrgyzstan. Here's the Hacker News comment thread on this idea.

Next, a good two-part article on Why procrastinators procrastinate and How to beat procrastination. Personally I wouldn't frame the issue in terms of procrastination (putting something off) but motivation (getting yourself to do something). Anyway, there are lots of cute illustrations of concepts like the instant gratification monkey, the panic monster, and the dark playground. The basic idea is that if you set precise goals with steady progress and make them part of a meaningful story, it's easier to get through the painful early stages of a project, into a stage where you actually feel like doing what you need to do. For much more on this subject, backed up by research, check out the book The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal.

Finally, some scary news: Forests around Chernobyl aren't decaying properly because radiation has killed back the decomposers. This increases the fire danger, and a big forest fire would send a bunch of radioactive stuff downwind with the smoke. My position on nuclear power is that it's completely safe unless something unexpected happens, and with the all the economic collapses and political chaos of the coming decades, unexpected stuff is going to happen more often.


March 16. A librarian comments on Friday's barista link:

Customer service is a dying skill. It is all about people, face to face ideally, trying to give them what they need even if that isn't what they start out asking you for, and making it a pleasant experience. Some of the best interns in my library came from tending shitty bars.

And you can't standardize it, although that seems to be the corporate goal. It has to be about *that* specific moment and the people who are sharing it. Maybe you just have to give half a shit about the guy on the opposite side of that desk or counter? If you actually care, people will pick up on that and express appreciation, and that makes a much nicer day for everyone.

I worry lately that with so much tech in the way of kids as they grow up and get out into the world, they have trouble with that kind of thing. They end up being rude or careless without meaning to be, they can't read the signals, so no one knows what's going on or how anyone feels about it.

In the coffee house in the linked essay, the patron wants to be validated in their hipness, but that isn't even a real thing, so what is it that they *really* need? Maybe they are asking the barista to reassure them that they're doing something valuable with their lives?

Loosely related: Why being too busy makes us feel so good. The article explains how we're too busy and why it's bad, but it never actually tells us why being busy makes people feel good, except with an unsupported speculation that it distracts us from facing death. I'm not qualified to answer -- I love free time and hate busyness so much that I sometimes fantasize about being in solitary confinement. But I'm going to be busy tomorrow and Wednesday, which is why I'm posting today and probably Tuesday.


March 14. More unrelated links. First, a surprisingly good reddit comment explaining hockey fights. It's like hockey is a functioning anarchist society, where the refs are mostly there to make line calls, and fights are arranged by the players to blow off tension and sometimes to punish players who are consistently out of line.

Another reddit comment about automation and the coming need for an unconditional basic income.

Inside The Barista Class is an overly long article with some good insights about class and culture in America. One of the main jobs of baristas, after making coffee, is validating customers' beliefs in their own hipness.

And some music for the weekend. Twenty years ago I would have said I hated jazz, and I still hate some jazz (for example this). But the word covers such a wide variety of music that inevitably I'm discovering stuff that I totally love, like the band Sons of Kemet, and this awesome live jam by Project Logic and Casey Benjamin.


March 12. On reddit, Erinaceous comments on energy decline, specifically some of the adaptations that we should be making but won't, like building local perennial agriculture, slashing the military, and requiring employers to pay for commuting time.

Really the only way we can stabilise the system is with a war effort style mobilisation that actually has the right game plan. It's technically possible (or was technically possible a decade ago) but it's not politically possible. So what's actually going to happen? See the Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Venezuela, Greece? That's the endgame if we don't do an orderly energy descent.


March 10. Stray links. Why I Retired At 26 is by an NFL running back who could make millions of dollars if he keeps playing, "but I no longer wish to put my body at risk for the sake of entertainment." I doubt that anyone reading this will be able to retire at 26, but some of you might retire at 40 by making a similar choice, that living on a lower income is better than what you'd have to do to make a higher income. Anyway, there's also stuff about how entertainment has harmed American football, and how fantasy football has reduced understanding of the game by focusing on individual stats outside the context of whole systems.

From No Tech Magazine, buses are outcompeting trains in Europe. In America passenger buses have been outcompeting trains for decades because the American rail system is optimized for freight. But now even in Europe where the rail system is optimized for passengers, people would rather go a little slower if they can save some money. I think all high-speed transportation is wasteful techno-fetishism. Instead of burning energy pushing air out of the way, why can't we just wait longer?

Personally I enjoy riding Amtrak (and here's a link about the new Amtrak Residency program where writers can get free rides) but even low-speed rail is politically harmful: because only one train can use the track at a time, trains go hand in hand with a central control system that decides who gets to use the track, and inevitably makes that choice to strengthen its own control. Meanwhile, roads can get people around with no central control except what's necessary to maintain the road surface, which can be done locally. More rugged vehicles enable more decentralized politics, and air travel is best of all. There's room to make air travel much more efficient if we slow down and develop hybrid airships.

For more thought about future technology, check out the latest Archdruid post, The Steampunk Future Revisited. I don't buy his argument that high tech is going away completely. I expect the most inefficient technologies to pull back to serve only the elite, while the rest of us use a blend of the best technologies from the past, present, and future.

On a whole other subject, a good reddit comment about why the terms "alpha" and "beta" are pseudoscience when applied to humans, and biologists have even moved away from using them for wolves.

Finally, a nice article about Alan Watts and his book The Wisdom of Insecurity. My favorite idea is in the first paragraph: instead of evaluating your use of time by how productive you are, evaluate it by how much time you spend being present in the moment.


March 7. Some music for the weekend. Last week I discovered the listentous subreddit. They have an interesting system to maintain quality: every month there's an election where people submit three songs, and for that month only the seven winners are allowed to post. Overall the music isn't that great, but it's almost all stuff I haven't heard before. This is my favorite song I've discovered there so far: Rocketship - I Love You The Way I Used To Do.

I'm still finding the most music through Leigh Ann. Here's a nice krautrock/space rock song, Wreaths - the designing women of asbury park.

Finally, I don't know if this is a true live recording or if they're synching to the studio song, but this is the most awesome live video I've ever seen: Esben and the Witch - No Dog.


March 6. Some links on Ukraine. This reddit comment by Nathan_Flomm describes the present situation, and the recent past and possible future. This longer reddit post by trznx describes the deep background, with many examples of worsening corruption. And this article, Why Russia No Longer Fears the West, argues that Putin has figured out that Europe will not stand up to him because they care more about money than human rights.


March 3. Yesterday on the subreddit there was a post wondering what I meant when I said "I see computers as humanity's suicide". So I wrote a comment explaining what I was thinking, and then I threw some doubt into my other prediction that biotech will be humanity's gift to the future. You might have to read the final sentence more than once -- I was having fun trying to write as densely as Ivan Illich:

A good test of any behavior, including any use of technology, is: what happens if I do it for a while and then stop? Or: does this application of technology make me weaker or stronger in its absence?

So GPS navigation makes us worse at navigating in the absense of GPS, escalators make us worse at going between floors in the absence of escalators, and so on. So far, most human use of technology has been in this category, so it's a good bet that we'll keep going in this direction, for example through virtual reality or body implants.

We could choose to go in the other direction, and use future technology in a way that makes us stronger in its absence. For example, we could use neurofeedback to learn mindfulness, or virtual reality to learn physical skills. I expect this kind of thing to be uncommon, so the overall trend will be for human powers (without technology) to be whittled down to nothing.

Meanwhile, it's easy to imagine how biotech could increase biodiversity in the long term (and a good use of computers would be to support this).

But biotech can also be used to make life weaker. Right now, almost all genetic modification is being done to make crops that are dependent on industrial agriculture with high energy inputs. The danger is that inevitable biotech catastrophes will serve as the excuse to give central control systems a strict monopoly over biotech, and they will use it to stamp out biodiversity and create life that is dependent on those control systems for its survival.

Loosely related, last night I watched some of the Academy Awards, and I'm just astonished at the level of bullshit. It's like those organisms they discovered living around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean where it was thought nothing could survive. How did our culture evolve the ability to be entertained by something so slick, cautious, predictable, and saccharine? Maybe the actual entertainment value is that if you watch closely with great skill, you might catch a glimpse of something real.


February 28. Some smart articles for the weekend. The man who destroyed America's ego is about the rise and fall of the self-esteem movement of the late 20th century. The evidence favors a picture so obvious that it's embarrassing we ever lost sight of it: 1) Low self-esteem does not cause violence -- it makes people meek and cautious. 2) High self-esteem is good when it follows from actually being good at stuff. 3) Artificially pumped up self-esteem is like a drug: it makes people feel good in the short term, but over the long term it has no benefits, and it causes pain and aggression when people's high opinions of themselves are challenged by reality.

The Obesity Era is an article from last year that compiles evidence against the popular idea that obesity is caused by moral weakness, and looks for other causes that we're only beginning to understand, including industrial chemicals, epigenetics, and economics. Personally I know weight is not about self-control because I've never had to use a shred of self-control to remain skinny my whole life.

The Mammoth Cometh covers many angles of the movement to bring back extinct species. One thing it doesn't mention is the evidence in Charles Mann's book 1491, that passenger pigeons had a relatively low population that only exploded after European diseases wiped out the Indians. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the age of synthetic biology. I see computers as humanity's suicide, and biotech as humanity's gift to the future.

Finally, something fun for the weekend: The 2014 Hater's Guide To The Oscars.





I don't do an RSS feed, but Patrick has written a script that creates a feed based on the way I format my entries. It's at http://ranprieur.com/feed.php. You might also try Page2RSS.

Posts will stay on this page about a month, and then mostly drop off the edge. A reader has set up an independent archive that saves the page every day or so, and I save my own favorite bits in these archives:

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