Ran Prieur

"So go, go, go, and don't look back at all the broken junk in your wake, cause someone is going to come along and know how to fix that anyways."

- The Teenie-Weenie Magaziney, vol 1 issue 12

novel

old stuff

quotes

about me

search this site


Creative Commons License

March 14. Yesterday I did some apocalypse scouting. I walked around Wal-Mart, not looking for products, but looking for empty shelves, and reading them to see what they used to hold. By now everyone knows that the first thing off the shelves is toilet paper. Also paper towels, and of course disinfecting wipes. The emptiest food shelves were all starchy staples: flour, pasta, and rice. I'm impressed that the flour was gone. That means people still know how to bake.

Good interview, The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming. He backs up my initial hunch, that we could be playing whack-a-mole with coronavirus all summer, and it will rise again in next winter's flu season.

Everyone seems to be assuming this will be over in six weeks. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see only three ways for life to go back to normal. 1) Manufacture and distribute fifty billion test kits, enough for most people in the world to test themselves multiple times. 2) Make a vaccine and give it to most of the world. 3) Most of the people in the world get coronavirus, and thus become immune.

I don't see any of these happening soon. Another thing the interview mentions is that the virus is likely to mutate. If it becomes more deadly, it will be less transmissible. If it becomes less deadly, it could stay around as part of the background.


March 13. In this cartoon, Coronavirus, Spanish Flu, and Black Death are sitting in a bar. Coronavirus says, "My vision is not to kill people, per se, but to raise awareness around access to public health." Black Death says, "Fucking millennials."

For the last few years I've been thinking that pandemics are no longer a threat. Now that we understand how disease works, have instant global communication, and the political tools to impose quarantine, nothing bad will escape containment. I was wrong because I failed to consider political factors.

But now I'm even more certain that pandemics are no longer an existential threat to civilization. Coronavirus will take its one percent, and the global health system will be "immunized", and deal more skillfully with the next virus.

Why has the USA been less competent against coronavirus than the rest of the first world? Because we've been so prosperous and powerful, for so long, that we've become insulated from the consequences of our own stupidity. America has been able to build levels of stupidity that other countries can only dream of.

After yesterday's post, I've been thinking about cults. A cult is a social organism that looks primarily inward, at its own value system and its own model of reality. A cult looks outward through a heavy filter, designed and tested to maintain internal coherence.

Postapocalypse fiction is full of cults. I think they've got it backwards. Cults are a pre-apocalypse phenomenon. They thrive in societies that 1) are prosperous enough that people can afford to distort reality, and 2) fail to make people feel like they belong.

If we ever get a hard crash, the social groups that survive will be pragmatic. They might be violent gangs, but they'll be violent gangs with a realistic understanding of the world they live in.


March 12. This is a simplification: there are two kinds of intelligence. You could call them "people" intelligence and "thing" intelligence, but I want to call them in-human and out-human intelligence, where in-human is the human social world, and out-human is everything else -- including human biology.

I'm framing it this way because our culture tells us that social intelligence is good, and everything else is less good -- but the more power the human social world has over everything else, the more the human social world becomes a bubble, defined by its ignorance.

To get power in the human social world, in-human intelligence is necessary, and the more power humans have over non-humans, the less necessary it is to have any other kind of intelligence.

Power corrupts on the level of attention: we use power to not have to give attention to what makes us uncomfortable.

Trump's first reaction to coronavirus was to call it a hoax: he was interpreting an uncomfortable threat, from outside the human world, as a comfortable threat from within it. The first reaction of Chinese power-holders was exactly the same. When medical workers tried to warn the public, they were punished for "rumors", and the virus spread unchecked for three weeks.

Trump's latest take on coronavirus is to frame it as a foreign invasion. That's why he's banned travel to the USA from everywhere except the UK, the nation most culturally similar to us. It's ridiculous, but it makes sense if Trump is simply unable to wrap his head around anything outside the human social realm. You live by the bubble, you die by the bubble.

The good news is that coronavirus, and at a slower pace, climate change, are revealing the limitations of in-human thinking, and giving leverage to out-human thinkers, to bring human cognition into balance.


March 11. It's an axiom of military history that every war is fought like the previous war -- at least by the losers. We're fighting coronavirus like SARS, which had around a 10% mortality rate, and was somewhat contagious. Coronavirus has maybe a 1% mortality rate, and is extremely contagious.

If coronavirus can't be contained, then hard decisions have to be made about how to moderate its inevitable passage through the global population. Maybe these decisions are being made, behind the scenes, competently. But I doubt it. What I see is hopeful panic: bring the hammer down on the most obvious vectors for transmission, and pretend it will all be over in a few months.

The new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, has been postponed until November, when coronavirus is likely to be ramping up for the deadliest flu season since 1918. Sports are being played in empty stadiums, which only makes sense for a short time, and as the lost revenue piles up, I expect team owners to call for cancellation of entire seasons.

If there's already something wrong with your lungs, or your immune system, then the media is giving you the right message: avoid infection at all costs. But if you're healthy, getting sick is probably your second biggest problem, after where your money is going to come from, when all human activities that require a bunch of people to be in the same place, are shut down for months or years.


March 10. When you catch a virus, your symptoms don't come from the virus, but from your body's attempts to fight it. The same thing is happening to the global economy.

If we decided to do nothing to stop coronavirus, it would run its course in a few months. There would be a big strain on industries that deal with sick people and dead bodies, but for civilization as a whole, it would just be a bump in the road.

By trying really hard to stop it, we've probably already done more economic damage than an unchecked coronavirus would do in its entire run. And we're just getting started.

I'm not complaining. The economy is mostly bullshit. But I'm curious how deep this is going to go, how many things we're about to lose, that will not come back.


March 9. On a loose end from the last post, there are two ways to slow down audio. The way that I used is like changing the speed on a record player, so as it gets slower, the pitch drops. Another example (thanks Gabriel) is Chipmunks On 16 Speed. The other way, which is more technically difficult, is to slow the sound while keeping the pitch the same. A popular reduction factor is "800% slower", which offends my sense of math. I would call it one eighth speed, or 12.5%. Anyway, at that tempo, everything sounds like ambient music, sometimes really good ambient music, like Radiohead's Pyramid Song or The Price is Right Theme.

New subject, but still audio: a smart essay from last month, The Other as Noise. It's about misophonia, a mental disorder where people find certain sounds, typically repetitive sounds of other people doing normal things, unbearable. The author speculates that it's "an emergent characteristic of a society supported by a phone-driven individual-centric infosphere that is itself split into bubbles."

Personally I have the opposite problem. I'm so good at tuning things out, that I get in trouble for not noticing things I'm supposed to notice. The way other people get absorbed in their phones, I can get absorbed in my own head.

It's funny, you'd think I'd be a talented head-tripper on psychedelics, but it turns out I get much milder internal effects than other people on the same dose. Then I go outside, and my mind gets blown by trees. I don't want to to call it "nature". There's the human-made world, and the non-human-made world. I'm getting burned out on the former, while the latter keeps looking more impressive.

I can also report a minor breakthrough in meditation. Eastern ways aren't always better than western ways, even in meditation, but in this case they are: A reader cites John Michael Greer, that "western traditions of meditation focus on the willpower, while the eastern focus on emptiness." So lately, instead of trying to hold a border wall against thoughts, one breath at a time, I just try to repeatedly create emptiness in there, and it works. I don't even have to focus on my breath, because if I do a good job of generating emptiness, the breath is the only thing left.

I've also been trying to put my attention on my body for at least an hour a day, which doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot for this culture. In some ancient and indigenous languages, there is no word for body, presumably because the self is the body.


March 6. I just made a video. Wednesday on college radio I heard the song: "International Dateline" by Ladytron (2005). Thursday night, becoming obsessed, I slowed it down to try to get all the lyrics. It occurred to me that it might sound better slow, so I put it into Audacity, and applied the change speed effect, 50%. The sound called for more doom, so I added distortion.

At this point I was pretty high, and decided it was possibly the third greatest song of all time, and it needed a video. So I started clicking through my "colorscapes" folder, mostly stuff from the imaginary colorscapes subreddit, going slow to fit the beat. It often happens, at the beginning of a project, that I'm really lucky. The images were in random order, but some of them perfectly fit the parts of the song where I happened to view them.

It usually happens, partway through a project, that things stop falling into place, and I have to grind it out. The song goes on a long time, and I didn't have enough good images. So the biggest part of the job was surfing google images, and clicking through various subreddits, to find more images, and then getting them in the right order. I tracked down artists with reverse image search, and looked through their galleries, and it's strange how often the artist had only that one image that I really liked. After that, I used paint.net to shrink, frame, stretch, or cut the images to make them all 1280x720, loaded them in the Windows video editor, and went through several times listening to the transitions, to give them all the right number of seconds.

It sounds better loud: Ladytron - International Dateline (doom edit)


March 5. Update on subreddits. The ranprieur subreddit is working again. According to this comment, reddit suspended it because someone was linking to sites that sold psychedelics.

Anyway, now we also have the weird collapse subreddit. That subreddit's founder writes, in this thread: "I think the best way to handle it is that people may post Ran content over here if they'd like, but r/ranprieur one should be the go-to as the 'comment section' for Ran's writing." I would be okay with just having r/weirdcollapse, but for now I'll continue to check both subreddits and see how it shakes out.


March 5. In postapocalypse fiction, the death rate is always around 99.99 percent. To find out how many people are left in a place, take off four zeros. I'm guessing that number of survivors comes from our ancestral memory, or our biology, in which we lived for all of prehistory at about that population density.

Coronavirus death rates are being estimated at anywhere from half a percent to 3.4 percent. The problem is that people who get a mild case are invisible to the medical system. That's also why it's probably not containable. But suppose it ends up at two percent. That's 20,000 in a city of a million, or one square out of a 7x7 grid.

Honestly, I feel in more danger of dying every time I drive a car. What I'm more worried about is that supermarkets will close, or supply chains will be disrupted by quarantines, and we won't be able to buy food. So yesterday I went out and stocked up on staples: dry beans and rice, potatoes and butter, flour and nuts. Also, If I get the virus, I want to be able to comfortably stay home for a couple weeks.

By the way, Snopes says it's false that the coronavirus wrecked sales of Corona beer, so score one for humans not being completely irrational.

In other news, over on the new subreddit, someone made a really ambitious post, the book of the living, a seamless compilation of inspirational quotes, with references. I've done something similar with my quotes page.


March 3. So, coronavirus. This article, You're Likely to Get the Coronavirus, explains how it hits the sweet spot for pandemics: mild enough to escape containment, but still 20 times deadlier than the flu.

But I want to go back to this article, also from the Atlantic, Coronavirus and the Blindness of Authoritarianism. Back in December, Chinese medical workers tried to warn the public, they were punished for "rumors", and the virus was allowed to spread unchecked for another three weeks.

I don't think the west is immune from this. It's what we call "politics", as in, "I hate all the politics at my workplace." Politics is like corruption, in that individuals are putting themselves ahead of the common good, but it's milder. Corruption is when individuals are cynical about the system, and break the rules to increase their wealth and power. Politics is when individuals believe in the system, and work within the rules to preserve their status.

You can't stop politics with surveillance. In some future pseudo-utopia, there may be no corruption at all, and politics brings the whole thing down. Like coronavirus, its mildness makes it more dangerous.

I've been watching the TV show Hunters. It's about Nazi hunters, but it's set in a comic book alternate universe where ex-Nazis, decades after the war, are still fanatical ideologues plotting to exterminate Jews. In Hollywood, everything that's wrong with the world is caused by Voldemorts.

In real life, there are no Voldemorts, and most of what's wrong with the world is caused by Ron Weasleys: large groups of nice people who veer off into terrible behaviors because they want to be liked, and feel good about themselves.

Going back to this post about individuals as neurons in social brains, I think the quality of individuals that makes a society healthy, is not empathy, or competence, but the ability to tolerate discomfort: to listen to things that make you uncomfortable, and say things that make others uncomfortable.

In our culture, are we getting better at that skill, or worse?


March 1. The weird collapse subreddit is off to a good start. Here's a breaking the ice thread.

Yesterday, leap year day, I took my first serious dose of mushrooms, five dry grams on an empty stomach, in late morning, in quiet darkness. Even on smaller doses, I find that quiet darkness is necessary, because the mushroom launch is so challenging. An LSD launch is a tease, with everything gradually getting more interesting -- but mushrooms are a gut punch. You're nauseated and tiny stimuli are overwhelming.

The peak was underwhelming. I didn't encounter any entities, I got nowhere near ego death, and I didn't even hallucinate, beyond snatches of involuntary daydreaming. At the edge of sleep, I asked the mushrooms to heal my anxiety, a realistic request, and they told me I must carry my anxiety with me, as a fish habitat.

Finally I got tired of lying in bed, vaped some weed, and went outside. That's when it got good. Mushrooms and LSD both enhance nature, but the aesthetics are completely different. On LSD, nature is heaven -- gnatclouds are companies of angels, everything looks like Dr Seuss, I'm walking on the sun.

On mushrooms, I'm walking on the moon. Terence McKenna uses the word "peculiar", which is the best word, but still doesn't describe it. Shapes are crystalline and sophisticated. Nature is fairyland, and trees are literal fairies. I could sense their personalities: stodgy pines, surly willows, elegant aspens. Not only is every tree a person, but every branch of every tree is a person. Whatever you're looking at is completely important -- but also completely unimportant, because if a branch dies, that life just moves to somewhere equally good.

I wonder how subjective this is, or how suggestible. If I say, LSD is like this video, and mushrooms are like this video, other people might say, "Yes, I've noticed that too," or, "I didn't notice that until you said it," or, "No, for me it's completely different."

I read about a study, maybe in 90's, of groups of friends in high school. They found wide differences, within groups, of every variable except one: kids in the same group all used the same drugs. Now I'm wondering, in the future when psychedelics are normal, if humans will form tribes based on shared psychedelic experiences.


February 28. I've been told that submissions are locked on the ranprieur subreddit. I don't want to have any hand in running the subreddit, not even saying how it should be run. But it's nice to have one, and if someone can sort this out, either by unlocking the existing subreddit, or starting a new one, I'll mention it here.
Update: u/theFriendlyDoomer has just created r/weirdcollapse.

One week ago, I had a really interesting dream. Compared to normal dreams, it was more vivid, my mental state was more clear, and when I woke up, it didn't fade, but stuck in my head like a memory. The first thing I remember is that I was in some building after a day of work. Instead of going down to the street, I went to the top floor, where I made an offering at a giant clock with stone hands, and put seeds and fertilizer in a raised garden bed.

Then I went down to the street, and realized I'd left my shoes up in the building. Instead of going back up to get them, I decided to take my socks off and walk home barefoot. I was at the south side of the city, and had to get to the north side, but as I walked, I kept running into dead ends. Normally in a dream, any path I take, I can find a way through, but this time I had to keep retracing my steps, working my way counter-clockwise around the city.

I noticed that my feet were numb, and started to wonder if I were dreaming. I saw my name on a street sign. It said "Prieur Death Banana". My first interpretation was, banana is a silly word, and my own death is not serious. But later it occurred to me, the banana is the only common food I can't eat. If I do, it's not life-threatening, just extremely painful.

Coming out of another dead end, I saw some people hiding from someone coming down the road. So I hid too, but he found me. It was a monk in long robes. He raised a long willow switch as if to strike me, but struck his own forehead, which trickled blood.

He said, if you get out of the box, what do you see? I said, you see the outside of the box, and in the other direction, you see the wider world, whatever that is.

He asked me if I wanted to get out of the box, I said yes, and he said, you have to kiss me. His mouth turned into something like a skull and also like a machine. I said, can't you turn yourself into a hot chick or something? He said no, so I leaned forward to kiss him.

Apparently he was just testing me, because he pulled back and said: if you put a chimp in any time or place, it's still a chimp. But a human, in different times and places, will be radically different. I can get you a job in 24th century Germany, or 12th century Germany, or 12th century Greece.

At that point, I noticed that the building where I had started the dream was not a place I'd ever actually been before, so I must be dreaming, and I woke up.


February 26. I was really happy to get no comments at all on Monday's post, but I do have one more thought about the Democratic party. I wish they would either get dumber, and play directly to the public's emotions, or get smarter, and talk about issues with challenging complexity and honesty. As it is, they all seem like schoolteachers, and the kids support Bernie because he's the funnest teacher.

Moving on, some smart links. Boredom is but a window to a sunny day beyond the gloom. The word "boredom" points to two things: having nothing to do, and having to pay attention to something uninteresting. This article is completely about the former, and recommends not fighting boredom, but throwing yourself deeper into it. That's what I've been doing with anxiety, and it's been interesting, but it hasn't made the anxiety go away.

Paris Mayor: It's Time for a '15-Minute City'. She means a city that's zoned so that "residents can have all their needs met -- be they for work, shopping, health, or culture -- within 15 minutes of their own doorstep." That's a great idea that American cities will pick up in about 100 years, when declining population causes non-15-minute neighborhoods to be abandoned.

There's No Homunculus In Our Brain Who Guides Us. It's about the cognitive-map theory: that we understand the physical world as if we have a third-person map in our heads. The article argues that that kind of mapping is a historical anomaly, only a few hundred years old, and that our actual understanding of the world is first-person: "it is not so much having a bird's eye view of the terrain as it is being everywhere at once." It cites one of my favorite living thinkers, Tim Ingold, saying that the way we navigate the world is like the way we hum a tune, where we know what comes next from what comes right before it.

I'm also thinking about creative work, where some people will outline an entire story, or a piece of music, and fill in the details, while some people make it up as they go.

Can an Economy Feel Joy? It's a fascinating thought experiment: that individual humans in large systems could be like neurons in a brain. The author leaves the question open, of whether an economy has actual consciousness, and only argues that it might behave as if it does.

I have two extrapolations. First, when the group mind is having fun, that's when a society is strongest, and when it gets bored, society declines. Second, what about the subconscious? Not the subconscious of the group mind, but the subconscious minds of individual humans. When big events happen in history, it often seems that everyone has gone mad. People feel strong urges to do stuff that they cannot justify rationally. Maybe the "consciousness" of a society is made mostly out of the subconsciousness of individuals.

Related: Coronavirus and the Blindness of Authoritarianism. It's about how China failed to notice the coronavirus during the crucial early weeks, because individual humans don't want to send bad news up the pyramid, or hear bad news from below.


February 24. Despite my best efforts, my attention has been drawn to presidential politics, so I'll do a post. The first thing to remember is that it's mostly theater. I mean, Trump has done some bad stuff, but nothing like what Mussolini did in his first few years. The system is so locked down and ossified that it doesn't make much difference who the president is. That might change in a few years if we get a congressional supermajority for something like single payer health care.

The second thing to remember is that you have no influence. If either the nomination process, or the general election, gets close enough to be decided by your one vote, it will be decided by the Supreme Court or someone else with more power than you.

So your decision about who to support is a matter of personal psychology. You're not making a statement to the government about who should run it -- you're making a statement to yourself and your friends about who you are.

What troubles me about the Democrats is their single-mindedness about beating Trump. They're playing right into Trump's game: being obsessively against stuff. Personally, even though I disagree with him 100% on policy, I appreciate how he's making a mockery of the system. And I would actually vote for him ahead of Bloomberg, who has all of Trump's dictatorial ambitions, and a lot more money and brains.

I like Sanders, Warren, and Yang. It would be cool if Bernie gets the nomination and picks another crazy progressive as a running mate. I don't know if that's a winning platform in 2020, but it's a winning attitude.


February 20. I'll be busy until next week, but for the weekend I have a film review. You've all heard of the band They Might Be Giants. They named themselves after a 1971 movie that's been almost forgotten. George C. Scott plays a rich lawyer who had a mental breakdown, and believes he's Sherlock Holmes. His evil brother tries to get him committed so he can get his money. At the mental institution, Joanne Woodward plays a doctor who becomes obsessed with his case.

Of course her name is Dr. Watson. She follows him on his adventures, and soon they're less like Holmes and Watson, and more like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza -- hence the title -- as the story plunges into full-on magic realism. In dignified society, this guy is a nut, following "clues" that are just reading meaning into randomness. But among the low-lifes and wierdos, he is Sherlock Holmes, and the clues lead him to make wonderful discoveries and gather a tribe of outsiders.

By the end, the movie has lost all mooring in our world, and there are strange poetic lines, like "Cross your fingers. That makes nine. I love you." And it's got me thinking about newer films and shows about "magic", and how sterile they all are.

In Harry Potter, people can fly through the air and shoot bolts of energy, but it's all part of an unshaken third person perspective -- strange physics in a spotlessly objective metaphysics. In The Magicians, magic does the work of physics, like bending light. In His Dark Materials, there are different realities, but the doorways are clean portals, out there in the world.

In real magic, it's the mind that's bent, and the doorways between worlds are in our perspectives. Two people side by side can be in different worlds and not know it. Battles between worlds are not gunmen coming through portals, but people getting each other to look differently.

In most modern fiction, not knowing what's real is troubling. But I always liked Zelazny better than Dick, and I'm looking for more fiction where objective reality breaks down, and it's beautiful.


February 17. Some happy links, starting with one more about video games. Almost Home is by a woman who went into Fallout 76, a multiplayer postapocalypse game based on the area where she grew up, and built a farmers' market, and then gave tours of local landmarks.

But here, in this simulacrum, the game offers a chance to recreate West Virginia as more u- than dystopia. That's what all of these games offer: the illusion of a world in which we, as the players, have the ability to fix what's wrong.

I remember writing a few years back, if the sun happens to cool off exactly in sync with the peak of human-caused climate change, that's strong evidence that we're living in a simulation. Well, it might. A math professor's model of the sun's cycles predicts that "solar activity will fall by 60 percent during the 2030s."

Dogs poop in alignment with Earth's magnetic field. I'm starting to wonder if humans could learn to sense the field, if we had to.

Dead Sea dates grown from 2000-year-old seeds. This reminds me of how mushroom spores are light enough to float into space, and tough enough to survive floating through space to other planets.

Single dose of psilocybin eased cancer patients' anxiety, depression for years. Terence McKenna has said that on a large dose of psilocybin, you become totally convinced that you're going to die, when actually you're in no danger. This reminds me of an article from 2011, now gone from the internet, about people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge, and had spiritual transformations.

Finally, we're getting closer to having a cross-country bike trail where bikes never have to share the road with cars. Although I should say, I rode the trail over the Cascades a few years ago, and I encountered more trucks maintaining fiber optic lines, than other cyclists.


February 14. For the weekend, some links about video games as art. First, for the holiday, a heart made out of missile tracks, from a Starsector mod designed to make combat pretty.

My favorite blogger, Adam Elkus, is also writing about video games. His latest post, OK Doomer, is about the 1993 game Doom, and why in some ways it's still the best first person shooter. This actually fits with the decadence argument, that 21st century culture is just rehashing and polishing the creativity of the 20th. Anyway, Doom is great because it has a small number of weapons, where each one remains valuable until the end, while it has a huge variety of monsters; and because defense is more about agility and less about absorbing hits; and because it's so easy for coders to add new rooms and levels, that there are lots of secret spaces.

And from last summer, an interesting article about how hard it is to make games addictive. You couldn't use an AI to design an addictive game -- it requires squishy human intuition.


February 12. Continuing from Monday, that decadence article is condensed from a new book, The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat, and Peter Thiel has a review. It includes the disappointing news of Douthat's conclusions. Of course it's easier to point out what's wrong with the world than to know what to do about it, but he recommends religion and space travel.

As much as I love fiction and games and music and art about space travel, it's just not realistic that we'll develop a bunch of really difficult technologies so we can spend hundreds of years traveling to planets that are nowhere near as good as the one we're already on.

If humans don't go extinct from boredom, but do something crazy and new, I have two reasonable predictions, and a wild speculation.

First, an unconditional basic income. It would be better to just make necessities free, but that's politically impossible, while the UBI is politically likely, because it would allow the state to prop up late-stage capitalism. It's not a long-term solution, because ordinary people need external structure in their lives -- but I don't, and people like me, who thrive in unstructured time, will plant the seeds of the world to come.

Second, normalization of psychedelics. The next frontier is not space but mind, and this is why we're not going back to old-time religion, because it's based on authority figures telling stories about the esoteric experiences of legendary people. When we're all having our own esoteric experiences, there will be teachers and communities to help us make sense of them, but it will be so different from religion as we know it, that we'll need a different word.

My wild speculation is based on the fact that photosynthesis is only 0.1-2% efficient. Here's a page about upgrading photosynthesis. It's a hard challenge, but still easier than interstellar travel, to engineer plants that are much better at turning sunlight into food, and that can spread unfarmed.

No empire ever rose in a place where you could live off the land. A bad society won't last long if people can just leave. So this is my utopian vision: after population decline, the world will be covered with cool ruins, with modquats climbing walls and groundapples cracking pavement, and caravans will travel the weedy highways through an endless variety of scrap cities and rustic villages.


February 10. Important NY Times piece (thanks Gabriel), The Age of Decadence. In popular use, the word "decadence" mostly means chocolate, so we need a good definition, and the author has one, based on the writings of Jacques Barzun:

Decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.

Yep, that sounds like us. The interesting thing is, he's not arguing that decadence will lead to collapse, but that it might go on for a very long time: "The Chinese and Ottoman empires persisted for centuries under decadent conditions, and it was more than 400 years from Caligula to the actual fall of Rome."

I'm thinking of this subject in terms of video games. In almost every game where you're exploring a world and getting stronger, from Civilization to Fallout, the early game is more fun than the late game. In the early game, you're living on the edge, everything is new, every upgrade is vital. By the end, you're just managing a bunch of shit.

How do we make a society where the late game is as good as the early game, when we struggle to even make a game where the late game is as good as the early game? I think the best strategy is to keep knocking ourselves back to the early game, and we can learn a lot from nomadic cultures.

It's funny because, at the moment, it's the right wing that's more likely to say that life is too soft and easy. But the reforms that enable being knocked back to the early game, are left wing reforms, that make it easy for the rich to lose their money, and make it fun to be destitute.





I don't do an RSS feed, but Patrick has written a script that creates a feed based on the way I format my entries. It's at http://ranprieur.com/feed.php. You might also try Page2RSS.

Posts will stay on this page about a month, and then mostly drop off the edge. A reader has set up an independent archive that saves the page every day or so. I've archived the best stuff, and they're all linked from the old stuff page. Below are the newest archives:

November 2016 - February 2017
February - April 2017
May - August 2017
September - November 2017
December 2017 - March 2018
April - June 2018
July - September 2018
October - November 2018
December 2018 - January 2019
February 2019
March - April 2019
May - June 2019
July - August 2019
September - November 2019
December 2019 - January 2020
February 2020 - ?