novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
August 7. Random links for the weekend. This two year old reddit comment has a great explanation of entropy using the metaphor of a box of flipped coins.
There are more combinations of coins that add up to "some of each" than either "all up" or "all down," so pure random chance dictates that we're far more likely to go from the all-up state to the some-of-each state than the other way around.
This reminds me of one of my favorite reader comments of all time, about a physics professor who speculated that the universe will never die from entropy, because no matter how spread out the energy gets, life will always stay one step ahead and find a way to work with it. You could say that there are ways of working with the coins where an apparently random distribution is just as valuable as all heads or all tails.
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Don't Work Here Lady is a trending subreddit for stories about customers mistaking other customers for workers, something that's more common than I would have guessed.
If you're in my area, the Inland Northwest Permaculture Convergence has been scheduled for September 10-13 at a place about a half hour northwest of Spokane. I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make it this year, but I was at the event last year at the same location and it was great.
Finally, a fun soccer/football video, Lionel Messi vs 3 or More Players.
August 5. In a crazy coincidence, Ugo Bardi also did a post Monday about how people like simple stories with villains: Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme. He wonders if we can hurry popular consensus on climate change by crafting memes, and concludes that we will win the war of ideas anyway when the evidence of climate change is overwhelming. That might be the easy part. Even if everyone in the world agrees that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, there's no clear mechanism to actually stop, especially if it will plunge oil-producing nations into poverty, or force whole cities dependent on coal plants to go without air conditioning. It will be easier if we have already suffered economic collapse and have less to lose.
New subject: on the subreddit a reader just linked to this interesting blog post, Could We Evolve into Ants? The big idea is, if technology does something for us for enough generations, we might physically evolve to be unable to do that stuff for ourselves. This is my favorite kind of extinction scenario: that we make ourselves worse by successfully making ourselves better in a stupid way. If machines that do physical work make us physically weaker, and machines that do mental work make us mentally weaker, what happens in Ray Kurzweil's "age of spiritual machines"? (And I'm not going to make this argument for the 50th time, but I don't agree with the author that we will be saved from this fate by energy decline forcing us back to a preindustrial lifestyle.)
August 3. Last week over email Anne had a great comment about how the popular collapse narrative has trouble thinking about disasters that have specific causes:
The permafrost is melting because of wildfires, which are happening because of El Niño. The Fukushima Daiichi reactor exploded because the diesel generators that ran the circulation pumps were flooded in the largest tsunami to hit Japan in several centuries. Specific causes are, definitionally, not a trend. Are the massive refugee camps in Asia minor part of "the collapse"? No, they're part of the Syrian civil war. Which may have been caused by food prices, by drought, and in turn by climate change, but it's a war. Once it ends something different will happen. The idea of a collapse as a consistent sequence of exponentially worsening events (or a single event with worldwide reach) doesn't square with the stochastic pops of unique and unpredictable microcollapses we've been seeing since Katrina. Without a single variable that can be plotted on a graph, how can all these random events possibly be linked? So do they even count?
This reminds me of something I hate about the internet the more I notice it: everything has an emotional or moral subtext. In the context of collapse, people are seeking hope or the purity of refusing to accept hope. Morally they want stories about victims and villains. And simple stories are always more popular than complex stories, partly because simple stories are the only thing beginners can wrap their heads around. "We're not headed for techno-utopia? Then it must be extinction!" Last week I had a visitor who quoted me saying something I don't remember saying, but I agree with it: the future will be more utopian, more hellish, and weirder, all at the same time.
July 30. Looks like I'm in a pattern of blogging twice a week, with serious stuff on Monday and personal and fun stuff on Thursday.
A few weeks ago Leigh Ann injured her right knee when an 80 pound dog ran into it from the side. Obamacare is working better than I cynically expected. She was able to get an MRI, pain meds, and she'll be getting physical therapy for partial tears in two ligaments on the inside of the knee. If you're curious, it's the two thingies on the middle right side of this image.
Last week a reader mentioned how unusual it is that I keep a journal every time I use marijuana. This is partly because I enjoy thinking and writing, and partly because I use it like a psychedelic, taking an occasional big dose to explore a different mental state. (Later this summer I plan to try an actual psychedelic.)
If you're not familiar with the 1-10 scale, here's a fun image gallery using Jeff Bridges. I'd rather be sober than high at less than a [7], but my lungs are so sensitive that it's hard for me to get there even once a week with a vaporizer. Edibles do the job but they nauseate me and the withdrawal seems to take longer. So I decided to hook my vaporizer up to a bubbler to cool and hydrate the vapors. I bought a Magic Flight Orbiter, which is specifically designed to go in series with a vaporizer, but it's not obvious how to connect it to a Silver Surfer because the tubes are different diameters. I figured out a trick and took pictures for this image gallery.
Finally, some music: Hop Along - Waitress. It has a similar sound to the Life Without Buildings I posted last month, but I listened to Hop Along's whole album and Waitress is the only track with really good singing.
July 27. Something related to last Monday's subject, Technology Is Magic, Just Ask The Washington Post. From the first few paragraphs I thought it was going to be about hoverboards, but it's about how police and intelligence agencies want "back doors" and "golden keys" to the internet, while engineers understand that this would be an information security nightmare. More generally, this is an example of how the big danger of technology is not that it will go rogue, but that humans will tell it to do stupid things because they don't understand the consequences.
New subject. I assume you already know about pirate democracy, but that link goes to a reddit thread with lots of information and resources about the golden age of sea piracy.
New subject. Stop trying to be creative. It's about a computer program that allows you to breed random images into images that look like real things, and it turns out that it's really hard to get to a picture of a car by trying to get to a picture of a car, but you might get there accidentally by trying to get to a picture of a face. This is a metaphor for the whole creative process. When your favorite band recorded your favorite song, they did not start out with that exact song already in their head and figure out how to play it. More likely, they were aiming for something else but were able to "maintain an openness to discovering whatever arises."
July 23. I have nothing to write about this week, so here are some bits from my marijuana journal. I typically eat or vape one night every week or two, sit on the couch and listen to music, and write down evaluations of the music and ideas like these...
Everything you hate must eventually be sorted into what you love and what you ignore.
The Tao is that which heals emotionally infinitely fast.
There are two paths from angry music to happy music: through silence and through noise.
July 20. Thanks naringas for posting this awesome Mark Burgess essay to the subreddit, The Cyborg Compulsion: Why the robots aren't coming in the way you expect. The big idea is that technology changes human society not so much according to economics, but according to the human need for life to feel meaningful. This is why synthesizers did not replace orchestras, and instant coffee did not replace hand-made coffee.
And the big danger is not that humans will give up control to machines that will turn evil or incompetent, but that humans will insist on maintaining control over ever-more powerful machines, amplifying the effects of human evil and incompetence. "The evolution of modern information technology looks a lot more like a cyborg vanity project, in which we equip ourselves with power tools to emulate super-powers."
There's also some great stuff about why computers are not even on the right path to develop human-like intelligence. Condensed excerpt:
Our intelligence grows from childhood over many years of training, through our physical and mental interactions with the world. We learn methods alongside experiences. Concepts are built up through ostensive communication, which is impossible without extensive sensory apparatus. For an intelligence to emerge, in an artificial system, we would have to very purposely build it and train it interactively.
I believe that all of those human qualities that we pretend are weaknesses (and superfluous in robots) like emotion, dreaming, and imagination, are precisely the keys to understanding what we mean by intelligence. The brain is far too non-linear to be a Turing machine, and these contextual states are what makes flat information into actionable intelligence. We seem to be trying to compete with a waterfall by binding together hosepipes.
It seems to me that enhanced intelligence is more likely to come from brain science, than from current ideas of artificial logical reasoning. To imagine that silicon technology is the way to advance intelligence seems like the hubris of computer scientists.
July 17. Over on the subreddit there's a super-depressing future scenario, People want the McPherson extinction story because real collapse is boring and sucks. This whole subject keeps reminding me of Anne's comment that every model serves a purpose. When you build the worst scenario you can imagine, the purpose is to mentally prepare yourself so that whatever actually happens will not crush your spirit.
We do this with what we're afraid of. I do it with the medical system. Leigh Ann recently tore her ACL or MCL or both, we don't know because it's really hard to get an MRI on Medicaid, and when she waited four hours in the emergency room to get even less help than she got at the urgent care clinic, I wasn't disappointed because I expected an even longer wait, a feedback loop of treatments requiring more treatments, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills.
My attitude toward the future of humanity is not fear, but fascination, and that has never changed. When I was a hard-core doomer I was doing exactly the same thing I'm doing now: seeking whatever is most interesting. But through increasing knowledge, experience, and greater ability to imagine complexity, I'm looking in a different region of the range of imaginable futures.
I suppose that's the key to happiness, and it's what they mean by letting go of your ego: to view even your personal misfortunes in terms of noticing what's interesting instead of avoiding pain.
Some music for the weekend, and if you don't like what I usually post you won't like this either: Dreamgirl - Teenage Blue. And if you're curious, here's the song I mentioned a month ago, that went from sounding pretentious and boring to radical and brilliant after I heard it enough times: Big Blood - A Quiet Lousy Roar.
July 15. Random links. Does Earth have a shadow biosphere? The idea is, we used to not know about microbes because we didn't know how to look for them, so maybe there are more kinds of alien life on Earth that we still don't know about. This opens a subject that I followed for years before I got into the anti-civ thing, and I'm still into it years later: fringe science. The book Biological Transmutations by Louis Kervran describes experiments where chemical elements seem to appear out of nowhere in sealed environments. Kervran thinks it's being done by known biological entities through unknown processes, but it could be the work of unknown entities. Getting weirder, Trevor James Constable wrote a book called The Cosmic Pulse of Life, where he claims to have used special photography to see giant amoeba-like creatures in the atmosphere. Weirder still, if you read enough Charles Fort and John Keel, you get a sense of shadow life on Earth that is not even exactly physical.
Reddit comment thread, How is it that most older men don't give a fuck? I hate the top answer, "Older men have real problems," because having bigger problems as you get older is nothing to brag about. But farther down there are lots of great answers. In my experience, every time something bad happens and you recover from it, you no longer fear that thing.
How virtual reality porn could bring about world peace. The author tries several kinds of VR porn and they're all lame, but one is interesting:
If everyone sat down, popped some goggles on and saw what it was like for someone of a different gender or sexuality to have sex, our shared empathy would go through the roof. At the next G8 summit, Cameron and Obama and Putin should all experience first-hand how gruesome it is to be humped by a horny bloke.
He's mostly joking, but I still think he's too optimistic. Look at how the internet puts all the knowledge of history at our fingertips, and people use it mostly to confirm what they want to believe, not to challenge themselves. If we have a choice, we'll tend to use virtual reality the same way.
July 13. Related to last week's doom subject, a great reddit comment explaining why Greeks want to dump the Euro. It's really smart until near the end, where he says "I have to believe that eventually we'll find our way back to growth / progress." It's funny how optimists and doomers have the same blind spot: they cannot imagine a world without economic growth. So optimists ignore the math and think growth is permanent, while doomers think the end of growth means the end of the world. I'm not going to make an argument here, just a sensible prediction: somewhere in the 21st century, the global economy will be smaller than it was 20 years previously, and we will still have big cities, big governments, and high tech.
And a really scary local doom link, The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle.
July 9. Back to doom. Esquire has a new article about the emotions of climate scientists, and it mentions scenarios all the way from human extinction to "We can solve this problem in a way that doesn't disrupt our lifestyle."
I want to divide this topic into three levels: science, society, and psychology. Science can tell us about rising temperatures and melting glaciers and acidifying oceans. A good book on this subject is Under A Green Sky by Peter Ward. This is the worst scenario you can get to with good science, and still Ward admits that it won't be as extreme as the Permian-Triassic extinction, because too much carbon has been locked up in limestone. And even the P-T extinction only killed 70% of land vertebrate species. It's not a lottery -- the delicate specialist species go first, and humans are among the toughest and most adaptable.
So given severe climate change and human survival, how will we be living? This is an impossible question, because a few people at comfortable desks in 2015 cannot imagine the options and the creativity of millions of people with their backs to the wall in 2025. On the subreddit a reader mentioned the 1972 Limits To Growth model. It's been pretty accurate so far, and I think it has proven that we can't go on living exactly the way we've been living. But other ways of living are outside the scope of the model. I can't find the link, but someone took Limits To Growth and applied it to the year 1400, and it also predicted near-term collapse.
There are two ways of thinking about future social adaptations -- or two extremes on a spectrum. At one extreme, any society that we haven't seen cannot exist, and our options are limited to what we have already tried. So if late 20th century industrial civilization can't keep going, then we have to go back to the 19th century, or the 13th, or the negative 100th. At the other extreme, what we have already tried is nothing, and there are unlimited options that we have not even imagined. Of course we're still constrained by physics, which rules out sustained exponential growth.
In the Esquire article, one scientist thinks that "consumption and growth have become so central to our sense of personal identity, and the fear of economic loss creates such numbing anxiety, we literally cannot imagine making the necessary changes." He's talking about the politically impossible changes that would prevent eco-catastrophe, but this is also true of the involuntary changes that will allow human systems to keep going through eco-catastrophe.
Last September there was a fascinating article about the mysteriously high Russian death rate. It seems that older Russians were unable to adapt mentally to the fall of the Soviet system, and they have lost the will to live and are dying more easily from all kinds of things. But in the coming decades the whole world could see more severe social changes -- people losing their money, their status, their jobs, their home cities, their ancestral cultures, their belief in progress -- without getting anywhere near a Mad Max collapse. So I think the challenges of this century will be more psychological than physical, and growing your own food is less valuable than growing your own meaning.
July 6. Stray links. A Brain-Zapping Gadget Made Me Feel High. It has two settings, one that's supposed to make you feel calm and one that's supposed to make you feel energetic. But the last sentence in the article mentions the placebo effect, and I want to see some controlled studies. I already believe that the different effects of different marijuana strains are almost entirely caused by the power of suggestion.
Good news! Iceland's Pirate Party surges into first place in the polls. It seems like the main difference between European Pirate parties and traditional left wing parties is they have a fresher culture. Part of that difference is that the old left is trying to correct past injustice while the Pirate party is trying to minimize future injustice.
Fascinating article, The strange expertise of burglars. Like every other skill, skilled burglary is about taking behaviors that a beginner would have to think about, and making them automatic. There are also ways to mess with burglar autopilot, like having a strange house layout or playing a recording of footsteps.
From my local newspaper, Why I'm Done Wearing a Helmet. Bicycle helmets only protect against a very specific injury, they might make you overconfident, and they encourage drivers to buzz you closer.
And if anyone wondered where I got that saying last week, "I don't have a dead guy at this funeral," it was from this two year old reddit thread: A Polish expression translates as "Not my circus, not my monkeys." What other great expressions do you know in another language?