November 7.

2019-11-07T19:30:49Z

November 7. Some loose ends from the last post, mostly stuff I wrote over email:

I cringe a bit when I use the phrase "local communities", because when politicians use that phrase, they're always bullshitting. To actually bring back local communities, we would need politically impossible reforms. Or a tech crash.

I'm wondering if the breakdown of local communities could be explained purely by cars and telephones, which enable us to have a larger number of more far-flung and weaker human relationships. And of course the internet pushes that even farther.

If people have more money than time, they are forced to use money as the medium of social connection. Only when they have more time than money, can they connect through understanding.

Erik mentions "mental grey goo". Grey goo is the doom scenario with self-replicating tiny machines, and some mental artifacts are like that. They're very simple and they can take over our minds. So, money, internet memes, and certain religious or political ideas.

Maybe all it takes to get people interested in local politics, is to fill it with the same ingroup-outgroup drama as national politics, and then our cities and towns would become as fucked up as our country.

Some music for the weekend. My favorite album of 2019 is by a noise band called Sly and the Family Drone. Their instruments are drums, feedback, and baritone sax, and their sound is basically space jazz, ranging from ambient to heavy in the same track. Their best song, Jehovah's Wetness, has a climax that sounds like whale metal.

November 4.

2019-11-04T16:00:27Z

November 4. A few weeks ago I wrote that the thought of my own death gives me a sense of relief, because I would be free of all my responsibilities. This goes back to my favorite question lately: Why is there so little overlap between what's good for us to do, and what we feel like doing? Then I was reading Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class As Soulcraft and found a clue in this line: "We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it."

Coming at the same subject from another angle, a friend writes:

I am reading some family stories of my 92 year old neighbor, whose father and grandfather are prosperous farmers. They write a lot about the vital importance of being a prominent member of the local community. Not prominent in status or power, but prominent in the ability to help, to meet needs, in their local communities. It's their obligation, but also, their honor. They don't buy seeds from the fancy store far away for half the price; they buy seeds from the local guy, because that is what a community is all about.

Why did we stop doing that? I reject any kind of moral judgment, that people were better in the old days. People are the same as ever, we always do what seems like the best thing at the time, but our environment has changed so that abandoning local communities seems like the best move.

For the answer to both questions, I blame technological complexity. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, or a medieval village, or even the USA a hundred years ago, the human-built world was intelligible to you and your friends. You could wrap your head around the importance of whatever you were doing, and if something went wrong, you knew someone who could fix it.

Now the human-built world is so complex that you can't possibly know enough people to stay on top of it. We have to constantly deal with specialists who we might never talk to again. And the specialists, even if they're doing something useful, are doing the same thing over and over for strangers, so they're not really into it. And at the same time, we're supposed to be super-nice to each other and pretend to be happy, which means hiding our gnawing awareness of how many things could go wrong, that we have no idea how to deal with.

Lots of people have written about the costs of complexity. Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies is mostly about physical stuff rather than human psychology. However you frame it, three things are certain: 1) More complexity, more problems. 2) It's easy to gradually raise complexity, and really hard to gradually lower it. 3) So when complexity falls, it tends to fall a lot.

Usually the way this happens, is that people withdraw their emotional support, and then their practical support, from old, overly complex systems, and give it to new and simple systems that make them feel better. Beyond that, I have no idea how this is going to play out, but I'm curious to see it.

Ran Prieur

November 7.

November 4.