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
December 30. Loose end from Monday, and possible teaser for a future post: does it count as technological collapse if a new technology makes our lives worse? If so it's been happening for a long time.
Coincidentally, I found out that Lemmy died five minutes after I posted that Hawkwind song. Here's a Lemmy obituary focusing mostly on his music, and the Guardian obit is more about him as a person. I'm not a big fan of Motorhead, but here's a live video of Motorhead in their prime playing Jailbait.
In 1972, when Lemmy added his amphetamine-fueled bass playing to Hawkwind's LSD-fueled sound, he turned 60's psychedelia into space rock as we know it. If you have good speakers, check out the bass after the five minute mark in the Space Ritual live version of Lord of Light. And my favorite Lemmy song is the original Hawkwind version of Lost Johnny, on which he made every sound but the drums.
December 28. My goal for this blog, in the new year, is to maintain a climate that confounds ideological thinking. Today, space tech. I think last week's SpaceX Landing is the biggest practical event in the history of space. The moon landing was a symbolic event, and we haven't gone back because there's nothing there and the only point was to show we could do it.
Now that we have rockets that can go into space, reach orbital velocity, and come back and land, it's going to get much cheaper to put stuff up there, which means heavier stuff that can do more. The next obstacle is the Kessler syndrome, which will force us to either somehow clean up low earth orbit, or make reusable rockets that can put stuff in higher orbits.
Now some of you think there's going to be a global technological collapse, and I'm not sure you're wrong, but I would ask you to weigh the possibility that you're wrong, to write down a scenario with precise causality and a timeline, and to rethink your models and assumptions if they lead to wrong near-term predictions.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk is obsessed with colonizing Mars, and I think that's unlikely, but not for the usual hand-wavy reason: "How can we live on Mars if we can't even live responsibly on Earth?" If you consider human psychology, then living in an environment that's already perfectly fit for us, and following its rules, is boring. The point of going to Mars is make our own rules and be completely self-sufficient. It's the same reason teenagers want to move out. And by trying to build our own ecosystems, whether on Mars or in smaller orbital constructions, we'll understand better why the earth's rules are reasonable.
I still don't think humans will be living on Mars, because anyone who actually tried it would be bored out of their skull once the novelty wore off. Like a lot of stuff on earth, colonizing Mars is a fun job for the planners and a terrible job for the people who do the work. That, and the fragility of the human body, is why I expect everything in space to be done by robots.
The robots might even get cheap enough that you could have your own personal space probe or Mars terraformer, and the ruling systems could give us real power in space to make up for our lack of power on earth. But ruling systems are power sinks not rational actors, and they would never do that.
To not be a dead end, space travel has to do at least one of two things: be a new vector for human autonomy, or enable a feedback loop where power can be leveraged into more power. Earth colonies did both, but I don't see space colonies doing either, and until they do, space will continue to be a playground for billionaires and poorly funded scientists.
Meanwhile, what excites us about space sci-fi -- the mystery, the weirdness, the open frontiers, the radically diverse worlds -- can all be done on earth with two developments that will be easier than Mars colonies. One is creative (or pseudo-creative) artificial intelligence that can generate virtual worlds that continue to challenge and surprise us. The other is cheap, legal psychedelic drugs. It's not a coincidence that psychedelic rock and space rock are basically the same thing: space travel is a metaphor for mind travel that might be only a few decades away. (Not that this will bring utopia, but it should at least give us more interesting problems.)
December 23. I'm just going to post music and take the rest of the week off. First as always for Christmas, The Abominable O Holy Night. The singer is Steve Mauldin, an experienced music producer with good vocal control, who let loose one night and intentionally made every mistake he had ever heard bad singers make.
The very best creative work has a primal magic that's strangely easier to unlock by trying to be bad than trying to be good. I think it's about letting go and being a channel for something you can't control or understand, and it comes down to the same thing as my comment last week that utopia has to be a little bit slum-like. Anyway, two other examples of terrible-beautiful music: Orebros Kommunala Musikskola - Also Sprach Zarathusthra, and Greensleeves on otamatone, a crazy Japanese electronic instrument that might not count as bad music because it's really hard to hit the notes.
Back to the holiday, we've been listening to a nice jazz album, The Ramsey Lewis Trio - Sound Of Christmas. It was my mom's second favorite Christmas album after Willie Nelson's Pretty Paper.
And Leigh Ann's favorite Christmas song is The Harmony Grits - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, an inspired arrangement with powerful vocals by Gerhart Thrasher.
December 21. Unrelated links. From the Shower Thoughts subreddit: In sci-fi, future people eat bland, colorless paste containing all necessary nutrients. In reality, we eat brightly colored foods with intense flavors and no nutrition. There's no need to click the link because all the comments are lame, but my comment is "Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump".
Helsinki Bus Station Theory is a short column with a good metaphor for creativity: it's not something you should expect to happen right away, but something that emerges after years of doing stuff that seems unoriginal.
The mystery of tetrachromacy: If 12% of women have four cone types in their eyes, why do so few of them actually see more colours? I was hoping it was because color vision is cultural and they didn't know they could see more colors. But it looks like the answer is boring: the fourth cone type often sees the same thing as one of the other three cone types. Okay then, if it's physical and not cultural, then biotech needs to get working so I can have seven-cone retinal implants.
December 18. This week has been like a vacation: I'm not going anywhere because of the snow, my sleep schedule is all over the place, and while everyone else is watching the new Star Wars, I've been playing the newest version of Starsector.
Thanks Doug for sending this great interview about a new book, Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. I have yet to use any psychedelic in a big enough dose to trip, but I poked around Erowid and looked at some DMT trip reports, and here's an excerpt from a report called The Elven Antics Annex:
They are elves/not-elves. They don't appear, they kind of ooze out of the woodwork seductively and before you know it they're there... They make Faberge egg concoctions with ingredient lists like: 1) space, 2) lust, 3) politics, 4) circus sideshows, 5) time, 6) gall bladders, 7) existential notions of polyfidelity, 8) cucumbers, 9) Beethoven's 5th symphony, 10) the smell of petunias, and so on. This is somewhat of an arbitrary list, but the point is, all my categories of mind fell away because they were being ceaselessly synthesized and re-synthesized... What you do with these elves is some sort of a game of catch, only the physics of the game has been replaced by the physics of synesthesia... Being there I came to understand the Heraclitus fragment: 'The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls'. It is this. As well I understand, 'Still the first day, All Fool's Day, here at the center.'
December 16. City of Darkness Revisited is a great long article about Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, which survived for several decades in a fascinating grey area between slum and anarchist utopia. It makes me think that any anarchist utopia would be a little bit slum-like, because if it gets too clean and orderly it becomes a socialist dystopia.
Another nice thing about the Kowloon Walled City is that it disproves John Calhoun's rodent overpopulation experiments as a model for human society. Calhoun gave rats and mice unlimited food in a limited space and they did all kinds of crazy shit. But the walled city did okay socially, and if you project its peak density over the earth's entire land area, I calculate 190 trillion people, which is orders of magnitude more than the earth can feed. So the global human population will always be limited by food before it's limited by how well we can get along in a tight space. And it's a crazy coincidence that Kowloon sounds so much like Calhoun.
I see overpopulation as a 20th century issue: it required a perfect conjunction of two factors that may never happen again. The first is a value system that develops in an agricultural peasant economy, where having more kids gives an economic advantage to both families and nations, which is why agricultural religions are against birth control. The second is rapid industrialization that increases food production so fast that people can get away with an obsolete cultural behavior, having lots of kids for no good reason, without them starving. I don't know how much the population will fall through food shortage before it has a chance to fall through birth control, but I think in a hundred years birth rates will be too low.
December 14. After Friday's post I got a long email from a reader who has had an interesting life on the fringes of society since being inspired by my writing years ago. He took off hitchhiking with a few hundred dollars and "everything I ever imagined the world could be like was there."
My initial response was that he must have been really lucky because I spent my late 20's and early 30's repeatedly trying and failing to find a good land-buying group or existing dropout community. But now I'm thinking it was skill. I'm a good writer, but if nobody knows who I am, I'm socially invisible. When I hitchhiked around the country in the 90's it usually took me hours to get a ride, nobody offered me a place to stay, and I ended up getting really sick and having to fly home. Without existing friends and family and money I might have died. So that's why I don't want to inspire people to quit their jobs and take off without any backup plan.
I told the reader, "If you've actually found the kind of dropout lifestyle that people dream of, you should write a book about it." And he explained why a book wouldn't be interesting because he has used a complex and ever-shifting variety of mostly unexciting tactics.
This whole situation is oddly similar to what I'm reading about in the book Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock. The best forecasters remain unknown, while the famous forecasters are worse than random guessers, because what makes a person famous is myth, a.k.a. bullshit: they start with a beautiful ideology or story, and they look at the world for confirmation, for details that make their story seem more and more certain. Meanwhile the accurate forecasters are looking for doubt, anomalies, details that undermine stories and lead to more baffling complexity.
This goes back to the primal divide between settled and nomadic culture. (Morris Berman's Wandering God is a good book on this.) Some thinkers are like cities, sucking in everything around them to feed a fixed idea, while other thinkers are like nomads, following an ever-changing stream of intellectual experience from one idea to another. Our settled culture rewards the most settled thinkers, so my most popular writing is from around 2002-2005 when my thinking was most settled. (Ironically, anti-civilization writers tend to be extremely settled thinkers.) Now I'm trying to be a nomadic thinker, and the best example I can think of is Robert Anton Wilson.
December 11. Last week I got an email from a small anarchist publisher who wanted to talk about publishing some of my stuff. My initial feeling was "oh shit". There's no money in publishing (until you get to the bestseller level and then there's too much), I'm already more famous than I'd like to be, and they probably want to publish stuff that I no longer exactly agree with. My only incentive to work with a publisher is if I can add some kind of introduction to prevent my writing from being taken the wrong way by idiots in the future. So that's what I told the guy (in a nicer way) and I haven't heard back from him. But I started thinking: what would I say in that introduction?
The way I think about my old writing is probably the way the band Rush thinks about their old songs: the music is great but the lyrics are mostly terrible. What I mean is, I still like the spirit of my zines and essays, their energy, the flow of words and ideas, the way they can make you feel. But if the reader were a computer or an unimaginative person who took the ideas at strict face value, it would be a disaster. If someone read Harry Potter and jumped out a window with a broom thinking they could fly, it would not be J.K. Rowling's fault because she presented the books as fiction. But I presented fiction as nonfiction. The world I wrote about was so heavily simplified that it's not the world we actually live in. If someone reads my anti-civ essays and thinks that a stable low-tech future is a realistic possibility or a reasonable goal, they could make terrible decisions that ruin lives.
Another thing I did was make black and white thinking fun. Now, this could be helpful if serious black and white thinkers read my stuff and learn to loosen up. But it could just as easily go the other way, where people start reading for fun and are seduced into black and white thinking.
And maybe the worst way my writing is misunderstood is not because of something I said, but something I didn't say clearly enough. Every subject carries an aura of unspoken assumptions, and if you write about that subject, you will be buried by those assumptions unless you put defiance of an assumption at the center of your argument. Specifically, the assumption around counter-culture lifestyles is that your motivation is purity.
A few weeks back I was listening to a podcast where someone mentioned that if you take something pure, and mix it with something impure, the whole thing is impure. Now, there are special cases where you need to think that way, like blood transfusions. But if you're thinking about open-ended complex systems like society or how you live, and you think in terms of pure vs impure, you will slide into a nightmare of ever-increasing sensitivity and cringing paralysis. Pure vs impure is the morality of a dead person. The morality of a living person is alive vs unalive. If you mix the alive with the unalive, the alive consumes the unalive, or animates it, and then it's all alive.
December 9. More stray links. How Your Brain Decides Without You. I've been thinking a lot about the subconscious mind lately, and I think it's more useful to imagine many subconscious minds with completely different identities and functions. Anyway, this article is about how we filter our perception to fit what we already believe, which is why you can't influence people merely by giving them information. And the article doesn't mention this, but couldn't we train ourselves to do the opposite, to give more attention to information that contradicts what we already believe?
The mysterious aging of astronauts. Living in space causes physical changes that are indistinguishable from rapid aging, and this blogger argues that it can't be explained by anything we already know about. My own cognitive bias is to assume that what we know is basically zero compared to what we don't know.
This reddit comment has hidden depth: My kids are better about turning off lights and closing doors in Minecraft than in real life. Actually you want to leave lights on in Minecraft, but if we pretend it's the other way around, I can think of four explanations, and two are in the comments: 1) It's much easier to do work by clicking a mouse than moving your whole body. 2) A game can have clear penalties for leaving lights on and doors open. 3) Unlike parental pressure, video games do not allow negotiation, and there is no social dimension of obedience and disobedience. 4) Video games put human consciousness into a different mode than real life. In real life we have to remain broadly perceptive, but in games it is both possible and rewarding to narrowly focus on details. That's why we like them so much.
The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop. Here's how I would say it: 1) The price of Netflix makes the price of cable look outrageously high, which it is. 2) As more people drop cable because of better values elsewhere and the ongoing economic collapse, cable brings in less money. 3) ESPN is the heart of American basic cable, and a ton of money has been making its way through cable bills via ESPN contracts to sports leagues and teams. 4) As this money dries up, sports organizations will be less profitable, and if you're not in on those profits, the collapse will be fun to watch. I'm guessing this will make salary caps meaningless, because the caps will be higher than any team can pay and make a profit, so it will be like the old days where the richest owners can buy championships.
December 7. Today, and probably all week, unrelated stray links.
Timothy Burke wrote one of the posts I mentioned a week ago, and I looked through his blog and found this great post from earlier this year, The Trouble With Sustainability II: A Dynamic Steady-State? It's all about how difficult it is to build a stable society in the absence of perpetual economic growth, whether you do it with a strong central government or by imitating nature. Obviously the latter is what we should be aiming for, but I think it would take us at least a thousand years of boom and bust cycles to get it right -- assuming technology remains stable. If technological craziness keeps going through economic collapse, and I think it will, the future becomes even more unpredictable.
The quantum source of space-time. I'm not even going to try to summarize this, but it's fascinating stuff if you're into physics. Here's the Hacker News comment thread.
H.P. Lovecraft Invented a Horrific World to Escape a Nihilistic Universe. The author makes a great point about Lovecraft's style: that he has remained fresh to many generations precisely because he ingored the literary fashions of his own time.
I would say he did the opposite with his philosophy. Rather than ignoring the fad belief of his time (and ours) that all of reality can be reduced to mindless interactions of particles and waves, he embraced materialism so tightly and understood it so deeply that he had to invent a mythos of incomprehensible evil as a less bleak alternative.
My philosophy is similar but completely opposite. Here's Lovecraft describing Cthulhu: "There is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order." But you could use almost those same words to describe an entity of total benevolence and joy, but so concentrated that merely to glimpse its reflection would drive modern over-domesticated humans into madness. Basically that's my God, and my religion is anything that enables me to see it a little better while remaining sane.
December 3. Over the last few years my interests have been moving away from politics and society, and toward psychology and metaphysics. But politics and society are much easier to write about because there is a constant stream of new events.
Imagine a world where there was a constant stream of events in psychology and metaphysics. Like if someone actually succeeded in putting LSD in the water supply, or if Japan was swept by a religion that made them stop valuing productive labor, or if scientists discovered where ancestral memories are and how to recover them, or if hallucinations could spread like viruses until they became physically real. Maybe they can, and it happens so slowly that we don't notice. I wonder if the whole physical world is just a negotiation ground for events in mass psychology.
Anyway, I'm going early into the weekend and writing about drugs. It's been a year and a half since the legal marijuana stores opened, and I feel like I'm only now getting competent at using it. A drug is just another kind of tool that can be used clumsily or skillfully. Before legalization I would only use it when it was offered in social situations, and it was frustrating trying to have a conversation when I kept forgetting the context. I was fighting against how cannabis makes me stupid, instead of exploring how it makes me smarter. Now I sit on the couch hearing things in music that I can't hear sober, and reflecting on my life to see hidden levels that I can't see sober, usually about communication subtext. I'm starting to think that every personal conflict is just a misunderstanding, and most people who fight are not even conscious of why they're fighting.
A more basic skill is to find a sustainable pace. Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg can smoke all day every day and thrive, but many heavy users are miserably chasing a high that they're not getting. Here's a funny excerpt from a Terence McKenna talk, How to use Cannabis. He recommends using it "rarely", which to him means once a week, "in silent darkness with the strongest stuff you can get and then immense amounts of it." At that level I would never get out of withdrawal, but I'm getting great results with moderate amounts of strong stuff once a week, especially since I started using a larger number of smaller loads in the vaporizer. The less stuff is in there, the easier it is to get a good lungful without my lungs getting burnt.
I'm also experimenting with the program in this video, The Resensitization Process. This dude claims that microdosing two or three times a day reduces tolerance better than total abstinence. I'm skeptical but I'm going to try it on alternate weeks for a while. The shocking thing is how little it takes to get a little bit high. Last week I got to a [3] with one long draw from a single bud.
November 30. A couple weeks ago a reader sent a speech transcript by Kenan Malik, Radicalization is not so simple. Focusing on middle class western Muslims who go fight for the Islamic State, he argues that they're not really motivated by religion or American foreign policy; those are tacked-on justifications of a decision they've made for psychological reasons. Like other young radicals, they are searching "for identity, for meaning, for belongingness, for respect."
In this blog post from last month, On the Eating of Lotuses, Timothy Burke makes a similar argument, that Muslims going to fight for ISIS are like young people in the 1930's who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Both are seeking...
the chance to really matter in the world, to put their lives on the line to shape the future in a situation where it seemed to genuinely hang in the balance. They did so in a context where the everyday world around them offered nothing more than stasis and passivity.
Both Malik and Burke have other axes to grind that don't interest me. But last week Anne sent this interview transcript, Can We Construct A Counter-Narrative To ISIS's End Goal? The interviewee, Scott Atran, has surprising strategic advice:
So far, the counter-narratives proposed in our societies have been pathetic. First, they preach things like moderation. I tell them, don't any of you have teenage children? When did moderation do anything? ... We've got to provide young people the possibility for some other mode of life that's hopeful, adventurous, glorious and provides significance.
I don't think that's something "we provide" -- I think it's something young people create for themselves, and society's job is to not fight them, to be flexible enough to roll with that creation.