http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2019-08-05T17:10:34Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#022edbf100c309eab300f4b4cacc4297b514ee45 2019-08-05T17:10:34Z August 5. A reader sends this blog post, Why Do People Neglect Maintenance? At first I thought "maintenance" was jargon for some arcane psychological concept. It turns out these bloggers are mostly interested in old-fashioned physical maintenance of infrastructure -- which puts this squarely in the category of collapse.

I made a comment at the bottom of the post, which I'll expand on here. One reason they missed, that people neglect maintenance, is that a lot of people don't think the system is worth maintaining. They'd rather take their chances with the world falling apart. This is a big reason, maybe the biggest, that civilizations collapse, and the best book on that subject is Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! Perlman goes through all of history, using beautiful and difficult language to suggest that citizens saw invasions and collapse as openings for exciting change.

This subject also reminds me of Gil Scott-Heron's Whitey on the Moon. The basic idea is, the higher classes are obsessed with grand projects, like the moon landing, which they see as achievements for all mankind. But the lower classes are not buying in, not to colonizing space, and maybe not to society as a whole.

A deeper problem, which is well-covered by the Maintainers blog, is that doing new stuff is cool, and maintaining stuff that other people have done is uncool. They think this is cultural, but I don't think we'll ever again see a culture where it's the other way around.

I think the important issue here is power distribution. Power will never be completely equal, but if the lower classes are allowed to contribute ideas, and have autonomy in how they do their jobs, they'll feel more invested in society, and they'll do better work.

To frame it as a general principle of collapse: as power gets more unequal, the grunts slack, and the system falls apart from the bottom. And the inequality right now is not just between rich and poor, but between machines and humans.


Loosely related, a quick note on the weekend's news. A decision that every American has to make, is whether to do a mass shooting. Right now, less than one American in a million is choosing to do it, and I'm surprised it's so low, because there are way more people than that who are angry and have nothing to live for. I'm not making policy suggestions, only a prediction: before the ratio gets to one in a hundred thousand, we'll see a ban on the AR-15, which is way easier to kill people with than any other legal weapon.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#f0ccce853f73e86f4146f25df51b627b3cb1f179 2019-08-02T14:40:12Z August 2. For the weekend, a fun Reddit thread, Despite what you believe or don't believe, what do you WISH happens when we die? The afterlife is a cool subject, because it's untestable, it's wide open for imagination, and yet it tells us a lot about our own world.

What people wish for in the next life, is what they feel is missing in this life -- but it also has to have continuity with this life. It's a different question than what video game you want to step into.

Some people do put a video game spin on reincarnation: they imagine designing a new character to replay the game. But if I could be reincarnated as anything, the last thing I'd want to be is another human. If I were an insect, I would hatch with full knowledge of how to be that insect. But as a human in this world, after more than 50 years, I still feel like I'm struggling with the tutorial.

I like the idea of reliving my life and doing it right. But I wouldn't want to keep my memories, because every time I took a different path, I'd be thinking about what I missed. Instead, I'd like to just have the understanding to make the right choices. I'm actually pretty happy with the big choices I've made, but my micro-scale choices have been terrible.

It puzzles me that some people wish for total nothingness. If even one moment of your life was better than nonexistence, wouldn't you at least want more of that? I think what they really want, is something they don't know how to ask for, because our culture can't imagine it: awareness without existence.

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