Ran Prieur

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

- Terence McKenna

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March 9. So a reader, Dan, is friends with the guy who writes the War Nerd columns under the name Gary Brecher. He tells me that Brecher is working on a new illustrated version of the Iliad, and is looking for an illustrator in a graphic novel or comic book style. The book will be mostly text with an illustration every couple of pages. If anyone is interested, email danrlarsson@gmail.com.

I also want to say a little more about last week's subject of potential technology. Imagine you're talking to people who have strong feelings, one way or another, about abortion. If you say anything related to the subject, they're going to assume you belong to one of the two camps, and that whatever you said serves your goal of arguing for one of the two sides. For the same reason, when I say that the whole history of human complex society and technology has barely scratched the surface of what's possible, someone who's wrapped up in the doomer vs techno-utopian debate will assume that I'm making a stealth argument for unlimited fusion power or the religion of progress. I'm against those things. My intention is to argue for the vastness of the Unknown Unknown. It's the same argument Terence McKenna made when he said, in the context of extraterrestrial life, that looking for radio transmissions from other planets is like looking for Italian food on other planets.

This argument has practical implications. If you think civilization as we know it is collapsing, and you also think that the range of human action is limited to stuff we've already tried, then you might expect to get a head start on the future by learning pre-industrial skills like blacksmithing or small-scale farming. If that's what you love to do, cool, you can probably carve out a niche. But if you think it's what you have to do, you're gambling your quality of life on the belief that your own imagination sets the limits of the collective response of billions of people to a historically unique crisis. One example of unexpected technology is the link below about soil-building cattle ranching. Grazing cattle is a pre-industrial practice, but only now do we have the ability to bring in truckloads of compost, and share research on the internet about when to let the cattle into a field. There are similar examples back in my February 20 post.


March 6. Purging my link queue. The Carbon Gatherer is about a cattle rancher with a method of steadily increasing topsoil while producing food, through composting and carefully timed grazing. I heard somewhere that increasing global topsoil by one percent would suck up enough carbon to reverse climate change.

The Drug Lord With a Social Mission is the best headline they could come up with for this wide-ranging article about the explosion of designer psychoactive drugs and New Zealand's innovations in regulating them.

Surprisingly good reddit thread, What are your honest opinions about "the friend zone"? I found this on AskReddit/rising, which filters AskReddit to show the newest posts that are getting upvoted. Because AskReddit gets so many posts and comments, it's like different filters (hot, new, rising, controversial, top) create different worlds with their own content and communities. The rising page is like a chat lounge with constantly changing people and topics. Also, because of my writing I'm often asked serious questions, and sometimes I'd rather answer silly questions.

Also on reddit, Destruction Porn is a trending subreddit for posting pictures of destruction and its aftermath.

The Man in the Van is about a young baseball pitcher who has two million dollars and chooses to live in adventurous poverty. Of course it's more fun to live in poverty when you don't have to, which is one of many reasons I support an unconditional basic income.

Finally, Philip K. Dick's Favorite Classical Music: A Free 11-Hour Playlist.


March 4. A reader sends this Archdruid post about technology and the externalization of costs. I had to do some heavy thinking to get a grip on why I disagree with it, so I might as well share my thoughts with everyone. First, Greer does a great job of explaining how technology, as it has developed over the last few thousand years, has given obvious benefits to its users and owners, while causing harm that is not obvious to its users and owners. An example would be a factory that makes a product cheaper by exploiting workers or dumping toxic waste. Capitalism rewards whoever does the best job of externalizing costs, which leads to higher and higher costs that are now poisoning whole systems like the economy and the biosphere, and leading to collapse.

So far, so good. But western intellectuals can't rest at pointing out what's actually happening; they have to turn it into some kind of universal logical statement. This is the same disagreement I have with Derrick Jensen: he observes the behavior of large complex society over its first few thousand years, uses that behavior to make a universal logical definition of "civilization", and projects that definition onto all possible large complex societies. To me that's like defining the human potential by watching a baby, and Greer does the same thing by defining "technological progress" so that it logically requires increasing externalization of costs. If you want to see Greer's argument as local not universal, you can go through his entire post saying "as we know it" after every instance of the word "technology" or "technological".

His conclusion: "a society that chose to stop progressing technologically could maintain itself indefinitely, so long as its technologies weren't dependent on nonrenewable resources or the like." My conclusion would be: "a society that made it a top priority to not externalize costs could keep improving technologically without destabilizing itself." Or, if we have a culture that is acutely aware of whole systems, then any new technology, in order to outcompete existing technologies, has to externalize fewer costs. You can already see the first glimmers of this in ecological food labeling.

So the externalization of costs is not a feature of technology, but a feature of human lack of awareness, which leads to one particular bad path in the vast landscape of toolmaking. We've been on this path at least since the invention of stone weapons that caused prehistoric extinctions, and I think we can get off the path without going all the way back there. Technological changes that benefit whole systems do not have to be reversals, but can lead us outside the tiny realm of stuff we have already tried.

What might it look like to keep improving technologically without externalizing costs? Probably nothing like Star Trek, and nothing like we can imagine from our amazingly primitive 21st century culture. But we can imagine the possibility of something for which we cannot imagine the details.


March 2. Sarah Harrison: The WikiLeaks Editor Who Helped Hide Edward Snowden. I was about to call this "inspiring", but that implies that you might be inspired to do something similar, when the real message is how much of an exceptional person you have to be, how much you have to sacrifice, and how much you have to risk, to even have a chance of making a positive difference in the world that anyone other than your friends will notice.

A week ago I had a visitor, Kurtis, who was traveling from central Canada to a permaculture conference in San Diego. One question he asked me was about how ordinary people can best engage the political system. I've become cynical on this issue. The system is now so resistant to change that I think the average person might as well give up on "making a difference" in the popular sense. Even running for city council requires more charisma and energy than most of us have.

Of course there are still lots of little things you can do to make a slightly better world that you can see yourself. Every fall I spread several truckloads of leaves all over my yard, and this morning the backyard was full of robins picking worms and bugs out of the leaves.


February 27. If you want to make sense of the new FCC net neutrality regulations, that link goes to a Hacker News comment thread on the subject. Basically the new rules are good but half-assed, and there are two reforms that would be much better: to use antitrust laws to break up the Comcast and Time Warner monopolies into many small companies that would have to compete, or to allow "last mile unbundling", where any company can tap into the cable going to your house and offer a better deal.

Fun article, How Crazy Am I to Think I Know Where MH370 Is? It's by an expert on the vanished airliner, who gradually developed a really good conspiracy theory: that Russian agents hijacked the plane, spoofed the BFO data to make the satellites think it was going a different way, and flew it to a remote airbase in Kazakhstan. Details include an unlikely combination of factors that made that particular plane hackable, and an airbase built for self-landing planes with mysterious earthworks at the right time, and of the right size, to hide the plane. At the end the author questions his own sanity for believing something no one else believes.

Some happy news: Abandoned Walmart is Now America's Largest 1-Floor Library.

And a personal update on marijuana. Three weeks ago I mentioned that I haven't noticed any qualitative difference in the highs from different strains, and some readers said this is because vaporizers don't go hot enough to extract CBD. This is a popular belief among people who smoke, and it might be true of some cheap vaporizers, but any good one is hot enough. If you do a search for "vaporize CBD" you will find many discussions of how to tweak the temperature to get the different components. Typically you would use a lower temperature early in the day to get the energizing THC, and a higher temperature at night to get the "couchlock" CBD. According to this article, Vaporizer Temperatures for Cannabis, the only active ingredient that boils above vaporizer temperatures is quercetin -- so I wonder if it would help to take quercetin supplements before vaping.

Also I'm getting a strange effect that doesn't seem to be happening to anyone else. Back when I vaped every two weeks, or before that when I ate brownies a few times a year, the high would be completely gone after about 12 hours. But since I've been vaping every four days, I have a permanent body high. You know when you're dozing in the morning and your whole body feels so good that you just want to lie there for hours? I feel like that all the time! If I were sick in bed, this would be a miracle. But if I need to do any kind of physical work, it's a big obstacle. So I'm going to cut back and see what happens. I'm hoping it turns out to be some purely coincidental medical condition, because then I have no reason to cut back on weed, and a medical excuse to be lazy.


February 25. I was going to write about something else today but I just got two emails in five minutes about this crowdfunded honey tap for beehives. I've been reading about this for weeks, and it's probably a useful new option for some beekeepers, but I can think of some reasons to be skeptical:

1) How does it fit with beehive ecology? Maybe having a weird plastic thing in the hive all the time is worse for bees than having a beekeeper open it up a few times a year. And most beekeepers will still want to get into hives for reasons other than taking honey.

2) To make sure the bees use the combs for honey and not for pollen and brood, they're going to have to use a queen excluder. That link goes to a basic description of how queen excluders work and some ways they're bad for bees.

3) No matter what combs are being used for, they get dirty with millions of tiny bee footprints, so there has to be a way to take this thing apart and clean it.

4) It's not that bad to harvest honey the old fashioned way. As a top bar beekeeper I never have to lift boxes or use expensive extractors -- I just open the hive, pull out some frames of honey, squish a few bees putting the bars back, throw the combs in a bucket, squeeze them in a wine press, and then spend a long time cleaning up. Also I get lots of valuable wax.

By the way, all my bees died last fall. I knew they were gone at the first snowfall when there was not a melted spot on top of the hive from their heat. Last week I opened the hive and there were fewer than a hundred dead bees inside, which is classic colony collapse disorder. But they left the hive packed with honey. I've been gradually squeezing the combs and I'll probably end up with more than three gallons, in addition to about two gallons that I had already. So with a lifetime supply of honey, and $90 to buy a new package of bees, I think I'll leave the hives empty this year and there's a small chance that a swarm will move in.


February 23. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day, because it's fun to be negative but not all the time. Let's talk about America's education system. This reddit thread features two long comments by vengeance_pigeon, arguing that the education system is all about money and social control rather than making people smarter.

Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley. I love how there's a concise summary at the top:

Silicon Valley's amorality problem arises from the blind faith many place in progress. The narrative of progress provides moral cover to the tech industry and lulls people into thinking they no longer need to exercise moral judgment.

How we created a generation of unsophisticated, picky eaters. This high-bandwidth article argues that human appreciation of food is being degraded by busy parents giving their kids bland processed food designed to appeal to kids, instead of making them eat adult food.

Wasp Without a Sting is not about genetically engineered insects. It's about the total lameness of Bob Hope.

How "Clean" Was Sold to America with Fake Science. Our idea of personal hygiene is historically absurd and was invented by ad agencies in the 20th century to sell us products. Personally I don't use deodorant, mouthwash, or shampoo, but I do floss every day.


February 20. For the weekend, three happy ecology links and more music. How to Grow a Forest Really, Really Fast is about some people who have figured out how to greatly accelerate the rate at which forests grow back, and they even have some money behind them.

Sea Level Change Adaptation Strategy is a highly speculative plan for how people in Florida could build mounds of earth that will turn into food forest islands after the oceans rise.

Life is Flourishing in the Iron Curtain's Death Zone is a looong article about how the strip that used to separate East and West Germany is being turned into a green belt.

A week ago I asked for music in "the grey area between metal and folk." Thanks Ethan, Veren, Tracy, Quincy, Elliot, Hartley, and Erik for recommending stuff. A lot of it was black metal, and I enjoy black metal guitars but can't get into the abrasive vocals. In the last week I've listened to Agalloch, Alda, Angels of Light, Black Math Horseman, Drudkh, Fauna, Finntroll, Giant Squid, Giles Corey, Keiji Hano, Mount Eerie, Neurosis, Pallbearer, Peste Noire, Skumring, Solstafir, Thou, and Ulver. Rose Kemp, an actual folk artist who shifted to metal, is closest to what I was looking for. I found Conifer the most musically interesting for their unique blend of metal and post-rock. And my all-around favorite is Windhand, just really good doom metal with great vocals.

Musical taste is hard to explain. I can use words to tell a story about what I like and don't like, but the actual judgment is made on a deeper than rational level. When I really like something, it feels like my whole consciousness is resonating like a tuning fork exposed to the perfect frequency. The best experience is when I hear something new and it doesn't sound great yet, but it sounds strange in a way that I know will sound great if I keep listening, so it's like growing a new sense.


February 18. After Monday's post, two different readers mentioned this recent John Michael Greer post about voluntary transition to old technology, The Butlerian Carnival. I want to move on to a new subject.

The War Nerd comments on the Islamic State, which is his term for what we call ISIS. He makes three different arguments. First, when American leftists, in the context of ISIS, keep bringing the conversation back to the evils of American foreign policy, that's a form of narcissism. I would add that it's tactically pointless. If Noam Chomsky had spent the last 20 years writing about baseball, the world would not be any worse.

Anyway, Brecher goes on to knock down an idea that almost no one actually believes, that ISIS are oppressed victims. He says they're like the old American KKK:

Former masters, accustomed to ruling through sheer terror, defeated on the battlefield, resorting to what they do best: ultra-violence and exemplary torture-murder, to reassert control of a newly uppity population they're used to ordering around.

His third idea is about the motivations of foreign fighters: that the reason Muslims in Belgium and France and England are hundreds of times more likely to go fight for ISIS, is that they're acting out those nations' colonialist cultures. But a reader from Belgium says they do not have the colonialist culture that Brecher claims, and even if they did, Muslim communities in Europe are much less assimilated than in America and they wouldn't pick up their host nations' cultures anyway. Maybe the simpler explanation is that Muslims in rich countries can afford plane tickets.

New subject, subtly related: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life. It's about people posting silly, mildly offensive stuff on social media and becoming objects of high-tech witch hunts. I think all of us have done something more offensive than these people got in trouble for, but here and there, almost at random, the wrath of millions will suddenly descend on one person. I think the participants in these shaming frenzies have the same deep motivation as European jihadis: their lives have no meaning and they want to make a difference in the world. They're craving a scarce commodity in the human zoo: to feel powerful.

Are there any better moves when society gives you no participation in power? I can think of two, and they're not mutually exclusive. One is to make small differences in the lives of people around you. The other is to let go of the desire to make a difference and just enjoy the moment, and Japan is ahead of the curve: In violent times, young Japanese just shrug:

Japan's youngest men and women were born into a stalled economy. They grew up in it, are used to it and are now entering it as workers. In 2010, a journalist named Taku Yamaoka wrote a book titled "Young People Who Don't Want Anything". Status, prosperity, success, victory, love, sex, truth, justice - the key motivators of our species since it became recognizably human - mean little to them. A half-ironic description took hold - the "satori generation". Satori is a religious term suggesting the enlightenment that raises an adept above worldly desire.


February 16. I quit my job to set up a post-apocalyptic commune. He ended up suffering from the worst of both worlds, being cold and tired and still struggling with money and bureaucracy. Finally he had a mental breakdown and quit the project -- but the oddballs he recruited kept going without him!

Even now, the author doesn't question his own vision of what the collapse of civilization will look like. I think we fantasize about the Apocalypse because we are drawn to the lifestyle in which we evolved: living in communities where we know everyone, facing physical challenges, and not being constrained by dysfunctional big systems. But even if there were some kind of weird disaster where you and your friends survived, and governments and corporations disappeared, I think the power vacuum would quickly be filled by new dysfunctional big systems probably worse than the old ones. I think the only way out is through: to keep experimenting with big systems until we learn to do them right, which will probably take a few thousand more years.

Related: Are farmers market sales peaking? That might be good for farmers. Ten years ago I thought farmers markets were the cutting edge of utopia. Now I think they're a cultural fad. I haven't been to one in years because I can go to Costco or Grocery Outlet and get slightly lower quality produce for much less money. And it turns out that they're not even good for farmers, because it's a waste of their time to meet every consumer when they can sell in bulk to restaurants and school districts. (I do buy my wheat from a local farmer, but that's a few minutes a year meeting in a parking lot to buy 100 pounds.)

If you're afraid we're headed for techno-dystopia, here's some good news: Why low-tech living is back. It's about the resurgence of books, vinyl records, polaroid cameras, typewriters, and simple cell phones. So we're not talking stone axes, but the point is that we are not being permanently sucked into rising technological complexity; we are capable of pulling back to get subtle improvements in quality of life.


February 13. For the weekend, some music I just discovered this week. SubRosa is a mostly female doom metal band from Salt Lake City, with relatively complex music featuring two violins. My favorite of their songs (and at 7½ minutes one of the shortest) is Cosey Mo. Also here's an interview, and I'd like to hear recommendations of any recent music in a grey area between metal and folk.

Horse Lords is quartet from Baltimore with two drummers and a sound that varies from krautrock to math rock to jazz fusion. If you like Rush, you will appreciate Macaw from their latest album; but their greatest song, and a contender for best stoner track of all time, is Wildcat Strike.

The Stranger is a project of experimental musician James Leyland Kirby, with a 2013 concept album called Watching Dead Empires in Decay. I would describe it as dark ambient or mellow industrial, and my favorite track is Spiral of Decline.

Finally, some humor. I'm writing this on a stand-up desk, and according to The Onion, Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.


February 11. Today, some feel good links. Anarchists vs ISIS is about a Kurdish region of Syria that is run by an eco-feminist political party and has "female-only paramilitary forces that have been fighting, and winning, against ISIS and the Syrian Army."

The Trip Treatment is a new Michael Pollan piece about growing evidence of the benefits of psychedelics, including making cancer patients feel better about dying, and breaking people out of mental disorders that are based on rigid thinking:

The impediment of a body is gone, as is one's identity, yet, paradoxically, a perceiving and recording "I" still exists. Several volunteers used the metaphor of a camera being pulled back on the scene of their lives, to a point where matters that had once seemed daunting now appeared manageable... Roland Griffiths likens the therapeutic experience of psilocybin to a kind of "inverse PTSD."

Why Do Cats Love Boxes So Much? The most interesting thing is that when shelters give cats boxes, it's much less stressful for them.

Finally, The Pro Dumpster Diver Who's Making Thousands Off America's Biggest Retailers.


February 9. I love this 2012 post about Chicken Sexers, Plane Spotters, and the Elegance of TAGteaching:

An untrained eye can't tell the difference between a male and female chick; their bodies are just too similar. Trained masters could sort the birds effectively, even though they could not describe what details they used for their decisions.

This isn't some kind of magical talent. It's a skill that anyone can develop just by repeatedly guessing and being told whether they're right. A similar technique was used in WWII to tell whether approaching airplanes were British or German, starting with people who "couldn't articulate how they did what they did. In fact, when they tried to explain, they had even less success."

The article puts this in terms of the conscious vs the unconscious mind, but I would say that chicken sexers are totally conscious of knowing the difference between males and females -- they just can't put that consciousness into words. So we're really talking about the part of the mind that is constrained by language, vs the part that is not constrained by language.

In western culture we have something I would call the Word Ego: the part of our mind that uses language wants to feel like it's totally in charge, so it builds a wall with a narrow gate where it stands like a sentinel, not letting anything pass from understanding into action unless it can take the form of words. (Or you could say the wall is to keep consciousness from passing out of the realm of words!)

As a writer, I'm like a lawyer who represents people before the Word Gate. Everyone tells me, "You put into words what I knew but couldn't put into words, and now I know I'm not crazy." But my job is only necessary because you have a Word Gate in the first place. It would better if we could all just develop our sub-language consciousness enough that we could trust it to directly drive our actions.


February 6. I've been continuing to vaporize marijuana every four to seven days, and I love it, but I'm becoming skeptical of the supposed differences between strains. When you read about them, especially from sellers like this local shop, you get the idea that different strains have radically different effects. But I've tried Blackberry Kush, Grandaddy Purple, Flo, Jack Herer, Northern Lights, and Sensi Star, and I haven't noticed any qualitative difference in the highs. Maybe my body is just not sensitive to the differences, but I suspect that the reported subjective differences are mostly from placebo effect and random differences in batches and environments. Also, I've just been throwing the leftover toasted weed in the compost, but I've just learned that it can be mixed with food or eaten as-is for a good edible high. There's a whole subreddit about this, already been vaped.


February 4. Paul Graham piece, The Ronco Principle, about an investor named Ron Conway who became extremely successful by being completely benevolent. Obviously benevolence is not always correlated with success, and Graham tries to figure out why that's the case in recent Silicon Valley startup culture. His conclusion is simple and beautiful: it's easier to tell who the good guys are, if a culture or system is transparent and unpredictable. On the social value of unpredictability:

If you're going to be two-faced, you have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away with being nasty to. In the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can't tell. The random college kid you talk to today might in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley. If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.

This has big implications for utopian thinking. Some imaginary ideal societies are extremely predictable, and predictability is one of the things we mean when we talk about stability and security. But if you want your society to generate good human behavior, unpredictability has to be somehow built into the system.





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