Ran Prieur

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

- Terence McKenna

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January 8. I want to continue Wednesday's subject while it's still fresh. Anne has written a follow-up post about the knowability of doom. Rather than summarize it I'm going to "cover" it: write an argument that's based on it, but with starker lines. This argument is speculative, and I think it's useful even if it's not strictly true:

A well-functioning human society that understands a threat to its existence will be able to deal with it. It follows that the really big disasters are not understood in their own time. Medieval Europe could see the symptoms of the black death, but they couldn't see the causes because they lacked the microbe model of disease. Because the modern world understands microbes, we have managed to control new epidemics like SARS and AIDS.

A collapse process that we don't understand might be blamed on something we do understand. My example would be the fall of Rome, which might be blamed on the Visigoths, but was really a long and complex process, largely about something we still don't understand: the difficulty of keeping big systems healthy without growth.

Looking at our own near future, climate change and the decline of nonrenewable resources are threats that we understand, so we should be able to muddle through them. If we don't, if we get such a big collapse that phones stop working and you don't have to pay taxes, it might be blamed on climate change and peak oil, but it will really be caused by our whole society being weakened by factors we do not understand.

But who is "we"? Because of the internet, human understanding is in a shape that has never existed before. You could call it long tail understanding: where a medieval university (or a modern university) only has room for a few idea factions, now we have an idea space with room for a million crackpots. There was probably a peasant girl in the 1300's who guessed that plagues are caused by very tiny animals, and she told two people and they thought she was crazy. Now she could put it on a blog where someone receptive to the idea could find it. I think, whatever history shows as the deep cause of 21st century collapse, someone already has the basic idea.

My wild guess is that person is mathematician Steven Strogatz and the deep threat is too much coupling in complex systems. That link goes to a three year old Edge.org question where he mentions an exact symptom that Anne mentioned yesterday: flash crashes.


January 6. The pattern I'm aiming for this year is to write a big single-subject post on Monday, make short comments on a few links on Wednesday, and write about personal stuff on Friday. But this is flexible, and today I want to write about Anne's new post, On the Theology of Monsters, Take Two, which is partly responding to stuff I've been writing lately about collapse.

I see stories about the future as a series of levels, where each level has more imagination than the one below it. Level Zero is that the way we're living now is just going to continue (and if changes are slow and your life is short, this story is all you need). Level One is optimist science fiction: the way we're living now is going to continue plus space colonies and flying cars and computers that are like really smart humans. The boundary between Level One and Level Two is marked by 1960's intellectuals like Buckminster Fuller, who thought that humans have one chance to expand into space and if we fail we go extinct. They were so mentally imprisoned in the 20th century that they could imagine no alternative except nonexistence.

Level Three is that humans survive in an a world that's like some world we have already seen: tribal hunter-gatherers, or medieval feudalism, or 19th century small town America. Anne references an email where I wrote, "The kind of tech collapse I don't believe in is the Kunstler-Greer collapse, where the internet doesn't even exist and everything is done by hand." Maybe my Level Three readers are a vocal minority and I should ignore them, but that's who I was thinking about when I challenged people to make precise near-term predictions, because I think that idea will lead to predictions that are too simple and too soon.

I'm on Level Four: the future will be like nothing we've ever seen, but still imaginable, and my version is a steampunky collage of preindustrial, contemporary, and sci-fi tools and cultures. Anne is on Level Five, trying to gesture toward changes that we can't possibly imagine:

...the surest sign of an actual technological collapse would be the inability to encompass and interpret what was happening; if a collapse is to be irremediable, it would also have to be permanently inexplicable. This is beyond the radio station going down and you can't figure out why the internet has been out for a week - this would place the root causes beyond the technology of human knowledge and understanding for the meaningful future.
...
In an age of total information awareness, unknowable blankness is emerging as an existential horror all its own and - pace Melville - is accumulating its own color, mass and meaning, becoming a rebuke to the very assumption of narrative continuity.


January 4, 2016. Over the last week Leigh Ann and I watched a bunch of college football bowl games. At halftime the marching bands come out, and I'm thinking about the difference between the game and the bands: even though the bands are focused outward on the spectators, and the game is focused inward on its own logic, the game is much more interesting.

One exception is the Stanford band, because they do stuff that's not completely inoffensive. This year, because they were playing Iowa, they made the shape of an unhappy farmer and tipped a giant cow. It surprises me that anyone was outraged by something so mild, but I think it's because marching bands represent the last bastion of "tradition", which in this context means cultural deadness.

I see the football game and the marching band as metaphors for living and dead culture. Living culture always has one foot in chaos -- its rules keep it balanced between knowing what's going to happen and not knowing. Dead culture is completely choreographed, so even surprise is scripted and predictable -- in Hollywood thrillers, you expect a plot twist about who the villain is. When performers go off-script, living culture feeds and dead culture breaks. Living culture continually earns its audience while dead culture needs a captive audience.

Audiences don't always know they're captives. When people leave the TV on all day, everything on TV has a captive audience. The Star Wars franchise has a captive audience because people will see the movies even if they're bad (I think only the original was alive). Creators can exploit audiences, but audiences can also pressure creators to give them what they expect -- Neil Young has been booed for not playing enough classic hits, while Bono is nothing but a mirror for his audience.

You know something is really dead when the audience wants to see breakdowns. That's the only reason anyone watches the Superbowl halftime show. And increasingly it's why we follow American politics. The political system has made someone like Donald Trump inevitable by creating an environment where he can simultaneously go off-script and follow very old scripts. How did it happen that the right feels more alive than the left?


January 1, 2016. I have ideas for serious posts but this year I want to spread them out to one a week, so I'll finish out the holidays by writing about music again. Posting my favorite songs of 2015 would be too hard because there's so much independent music now that it takes a long time to find stuff, so I'm doing a one year lag and posting my favorites from 2014. These are not in order of quality but playlist order.

Doctopus - Wobbegong is a garage rock masterpiece, and an example of the elusive raw and intense happy song that I mentioned a few weeks ago. This is their only great song.

Too Many Zooz - Dima is by a jazz three-piece that got their start playing in the NYC subways. Because of this environment, trying to hold the attention of a distracted audience, their music never wastes a second. Their entire Brasshouse volume 1 album is basically this good.

Esben and the Witch - No Dog is a powerful noise rock song that was recorded live for this awesome video, and it came out better than the studio version. Plug your computer into your stereo, play it loud and watch the video, and this is the best song of 2014.

Big Blood - You Need Then It Comes is from my favorite band and my favorite singer-songwriter, Colleen Kinsella. The music is clean and heavy like a space battleship, with a mysterious high instrument (a theremin?) complementing harmonium and dense, tight electric guitar that bursts in and out of silence. I want them to do a whole album like this.

Your Friend - Bangs is by singer-songwriter Taryn Miller backed by other Lawrence Kansas musicians. Her Jekyll/Hyde album has one other great song, Tame One, but I picked Bangs for my list because it has a more distinctive sound.

Big Blood - Sick With Information is by the other member of my favorite band, Caleb Mulkerin. It's like a beautiful campfire song about human extinction. "With almanacs and earthquakes, we will all celebrate the end."


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. 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.


December 7. H.P. Lovecraft Invented a Horrific World to Escape a Nihilistic Universe. Like most intellectuals of his time (and ours) Lovecraft was a philosophical materialist, and because he had enough imagination to really understand that position, 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.





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