]]>Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another's, and their walk by another's pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.
The bug: Our mainstream economic system is oriented towards maximal production and growth. This effectively means that participants are forced to maximize their portions of the cake in order to stay in the game. It is therefore necessary to insert useless and even harmful "tumor material" in one's own economical portion in order to avoid losing one's position. This produces an ever-growing global parasite fungus that manifests as things like black boxes, planned obsolescence and artificial creation of needs.
Wow, Ivan Illich lives! Then he goes into more detail about "black boxes". Ground-level processes that humans used to do on their own, are automated into modules, which are stuck together with other modules into bigger modules. In theory this makes life easier but really it makes life less meaningful:
People who have a paid job, for example, can be regarded as modules that try to fulfill a set of requirements in order to remain acceptable pieces of the system. When using the money, they can be regarded as modules that consume services produced by other modules. What happens beyond the interface is considered irrelevant, and this irrelevance is a major source of alienation. Compare someone who grows and chops their own wood for heating to someone who works in forest industry and buys burnwood with the paycheck. In the former case, it is easier to get genuinely interested by all the aspects of forests and wood because they directly affect one's life. In the latter case, fulfilling the unit requirements is enough.
So what can we do about this? VIznut suggests that hackers build popular movements of making useful tools and art "with low-complexity computer and electronic systems." I never would have thought of that, but I still don't see it happening. What I see instead is more and more useful stuff (from programming to wood-chopping) being automated, as more people turn their attention to virtual worlds designed to seem more meaningful than reality ever could. And when we finally get burned out at the farthest limits of artificial superstimuli, then we must either go back to painful unrewarding reality or go extinct, and one of those will be much easier.
Or, before we get too far on that path, reality will catch up to us in the form of the collapse of the global economy: Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse. I still see no evidence for a technological collapse, but maybe we'll have no time for Minecraft version 27 because we'll be too busy foraging bugs and tree cambium -- or building low-tech drones to fight the high-tech drones of occupying armies.
]]>To master any truly difficult skill it's not enough to just want it; you have to be obsessed. If you have to force yourself to pick it up you're screwed; if you have to force yourself to put it down you know you're on the right track.
You told me that the only thing you've ever had to force yourself to stop was video games. Ask yourself: why exactly are video games so addictive? Of course it's because of the constant reward system. Every thirty seconds you get a reward of some kind. The next question is: how can I duplicate this experience in other areas?
When I was learning to play, I always broke any challenge down into it's smallest possible chunks. A fast lick might seem impossible taken as a whole, but how difficult is it to play the first three notes? If I play those three notes over and over for ten minutes, always keeping it down to a tempo at which I can play it correctly at all times, will I be able to work them up to performance tempo in those ten minutes? Assuming you haven't chosen something way beyond your level, the answer is probably yes!
By doing it this way, you're creating a lot of very small, quick successes for yourself. If you set yourself a goal to bring those first three notes up to performance tempo and you succeed in just a few minutes, the flush of success releases endorphins in the brain. If you continue to duplicate that experience every few minutes you get addicted to practicing.
Talent is an intuitive grasp of rapid learning. Fortunately you don't really need that intuitive understanding... that's what a teacher is for! Unfortunately most teachers haven't analyzed their own formative years sufficiently to understand the ingredients of their own success as players. I have consistently found that students who listen to me and practice as I described above will progress ten times faster than anyone else.
It's also true that these are the students who become obsessed. I've believed for years that they listened to me and practiced in this way because they were obsessed, but since I've come to believe that I had cause and effect confused. They become obsessed because they practice this way!
Ironically, you can also find isolation in the heart of cities. A lot of mentally ill people become homeless in order to find that isolation, that release from social requirements. Yes, you see people, so aren't literally physically isolated, but you're not seen yourself.
The story behind homelessness goes deeper than poverty. It's about human society veering so far from human nature that millions of people cannot or will not live in it. And the people who can easily live in it are tempted to feel morally superior to the people who can't, when really they're just luckier.
This comes around to my favorite utopian vision, the unconditional basic income. A German Guy Wants to Give You a Bunch of Money for Nothing. It's an interview with a tech startup founder who loved his own unconditional income so much that he has raised enough for two other people to do it for a year.
Also related, a post from a few months back on Raptitude.com: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed.
]]>Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
Our own capitalist drive pushes these technologies to evolve. We push the technology down an evolutionary path that results in the most addictive possible outcome. Yet even as we do this, it doesn't feel as though we have any control. It feels, instead, like a destined outcome -- a fate.
People like me who grew up before the internet (especially if we saw little or no television) might be, in some ways, the last intelligent humans. You've probably seen the studies about marijuana affecting brain development, which is why it will remain illegal for people under 21. Imagine if someone said, "These changes are just how the brain adapts to a better world. Responsible parents will give cannabis treats to their infants to prepare them for a future utopia where everyone is stoned all the time." That's exactly what people are saying about tiny computers, and the difference is that computers are much more powerful and dangerous.
Even more depressing, Most Americans Want to Criminalize Pre-Teens Playing Unsupervised. I'm wondering, are these trends temporary or permanent? Are we raising a lost generation, or are we plunging toward extinction?
]]>Civil wars are first and foremost about local score settling. The trigger isn't some guy going door to door saying "you know those Yazidis? We're starting a group to get rid of them, would you like to know why?" Everyone was already itching to kill the Yazidis. The trigger in most civil wars is the sense that the long-repressed vengeance on your nearest and dearest enemies has become possible. This means that much of the killing in civil wars follows the demographics of murder, rather than genocide.
Civil wars are almost never geographic at first. Syria was not divided into "rebel" and "government" territories until after several weeks of fighting. Why? Because the government troops and the people who hated them were evenly dispersed around the country. Once the shooting broke out, some local battles went one way, some went another, and each side eventually had to work out supply lines connecting places where they'd won. Your loyalties aren't determined by your residency, your residency is determined by which army you're running away from.
There is no home front in a civil war. Every action by every side degrades the lives of both sides. Think of the worst divorce you've ever seen your friends go through, and think of the worst moment in that divorce, and that's how everybody feels in a civil war all the time.
Civil wars aren't anybody's program. Usually the two sides each feel like they are legitimate, and can't figure out what the other guys are playing at. They think "shit, these guys are clowns, lets just get them out of the way." Everybody underestimates the consequences of their actions, the time it will take, and the dying that will happen as a result. Nobody in Syria in 2011 was saying "right, lets call a protest, and in three years we'll be holed up in a burning hotel shooting twelve-year-olds in the head as they pull their mothers' bodies from a drainage canal!"
No, we aren't headed for a civil war. For now, the local scores are too stupid to settle -- what would a red-state insurgent mob do if the veil were torn, burn coal? Shoot latinos? Give it a decade, maybe, but not now.