about me

What's new?

May 2020. I've recently updated some of the stuff below, including both 100-word summaries. Because of Coronavirus, I'll be staying in Pullman for at least another year.

Also, check out Jordan Mechano's video about me.

How do you say your name?

My first name rhymes with Dan, not Don. Think of the Flock of Seagulls song, not the Kurosawa film. And I pronounce my last name like it rhymes with "free-er," but the French pronunciation is cool too.

I've just discovered your site. What should I read first?

The blog archives. The essays have a lot of stuff I've changed my mind about.

Like what?

I got my start by taking the most exciting and epic ideas, and squinting my perspective to make them sound true. Gradually I converted to the other side: actually trying to figure shit out.

I used to write as if I could influence public policy, and it's a bad habit I still fall into, but I try to write like a disinterested visitor making sense of the world.

It might seem like I stopped writing essays, but I think I just got better at being concise, and now I can say almost anything I need to say in six paragraphs.

I used to see collapse happening for physical reasons, like resources and climate. Now I see it happening for mainly psychological reasons: that the tasks necessary to keep the system going, are drifting too far from what we enjoy doing.

I used to be a doomer optimist, expecting the collapse of complex society to make a better world. Then I expected the big systems to muddle through the coming disasters and tried to figure out the details. I still think high tech will survive and get weirder, but since Coronavirus, I have no idea what's going to happen with the economy.

I used to think rural homesteading was a good idea. Then I noticed that almost everyone who tried it was unhappy and did way too much driving, and my strategy changed to getting a modest house in a city with cheap housing, with a yard for fruit trees. Now I'm just making it up as I go.

I used to treat "civilization" as a monolithic idea, a simple black box that could just be plugged into ideological equations. Now I see it as a bunch of different things that have been linked in the past, but do not have to be linked. But here's a positive definition of "civilization": the increase in elegant complexity of human-made systems, and we have all kinds of room to do better.

There are two motivations in primitivism, and I accidentally fed the wrong one: the desire to participate in radical change driven by moral judgments, which is what got us into this mess in the first place. The other motivation is to live like actual people in the best primitive tribes: have modest needs, zero coercion, and a nomadic mental state. These are not incompatible with high tech.

Can you condense your political ideas to under 100 words?

The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to say no. In a zero-coercion society, there is so much overlap between what's necessary to keep the system going, and what people want to do anyway, that nobody cares if you do nothing. Telling stories to make people want to do things is unsustainable. Utopia must be constantly reinvented at the level of basic actions that people enjoy in no-mind. I don't care how we get there, and we have a long way to go, but right now I support an unconditional basic income paid for by a financial transaction tax.

How about your philosophical ideas?

There is only one place, there is only one time, and there is only one mind. All the varieties of these things are just different ways of looking. Our gaze creates reality -- not alone, but negotiating with other gazes. Mind is hardware and matter is software. The brain is a user interface for a filter. Atoms and planets are desktop icons on an incomprehensible computer. Physics and astronomy are squinting at pixels, that only fill themselves in when we look. Humans are the only thing in our local universe, that doesn't know the universe is alive.

Who is your biggest role model?

Paul Erdos, who was such a good mathematician that he traveled around staying with other mathematicians, and they would take care of all his practical needs while he just talked with them about math. Erdos said this when he took a month off from amphetamines: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." That's how I feel about cannabis and fiction.

How much weed do you smoke?

I use a Silver Surfer vaporizer, which is extremely efficient, so it comes out to only a gram a month. Weed gives me creative superpowers, and raises my emotional intelligence to nearly normal. It makes me feel like my life is a video watched by God.

I wish I could feel like that all the time, but the more I use it, the more it just makes me feel numb. Also it gives me low-quality sleep that feels like high-quality sleep, but wears out my body. So I do all kinds of self-experiments to figure out how to maximize benefits and minimize costs. Lately I've been doing one session a day for three days, and then two full days off.

What about other drugs?

I do LSD and mushrooms, not at the same time, a few times a year. I've never hallucinated, but things look different. LSD is like the white keys on a piano, and mushrooms are like the black keys. LSD is like walking on the sun, and mushrooms are like walking on the moon. On LSD, nature is heaven and clouds of insects are angels. On mushrooms, nature is fairyland and trees are literal fairies.

What is your favorite long fiction?

In order of when I read them: Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Hitoshi Ashinano, Little, Big by John Crowley, A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery.

What one piece of advice would you give your younger self?

Instead of fixating on goals, practice quickly noticing fleeting opportunities.

Does your blog have an RSS feed?

Doing it myself would be too much work, but Patrick has written a script that creates a feed based on the way I format my entries. I've uploaded it to http://ranprieur.com/feed.php. You might also try Page2RSS.

Do you plan on publishing your old writing?

In 2011, a friend went on lulu.com and cranked out a book in a day. It's called How to Drop Out and Other Essays. That link goes to the paperback, and here's the hardcover. There's also a collection of my zines: paperback and hardcover. Nobody is making money on this, not even Lulu since they take a percentage of the author's profits. Some of the texts are also available as free pdf downloads. Thanks Alex!

I thought you lived on an off-grid homestead.

No, but you can read about those adventures in my old Landblog FAQ or the landblog archives from 2004-2011.

What's your email address?

My name with no spaces at gmail.com.
I like it when people email me to say hi. You don't have to bring gifts. You can also post on the Ran Prieur subreddit.

Old Interviews

In text, the BoingBoing interview by Avi, and older interviews by by Tim Boucher and Burn the Furniture.
In audio, interviews by Paul Wheaton (2011, 28 minutes), Aaron (2006? 40 minutes), Ken Rose (2011, 46 minutes), and Mark Haim at KOPN (2009, 51 minutes).
And here are four videos, around 100 minutes total, of me being interviewed in October 2005 for What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Old Personal links

100 things about me
Frugal Early Retirement FAQ
Winter Tour FAQ
How I bought a house
I bought land
My July 2004 bike trip
Favorite Films

Music

Favorite Songs is the most frequently updated page on this site other than the home page. Lately I've been making playlists.
Favorite Albums plus Hawkwind
Ecstasy and Doom is my Big Blood fan page, and the main thing I worked on for more than a year around 2015.